livers; an old whaler, which seemed to drip oil, back from a year of
cruising in the Arctic. Even the tramp windjammers were deep chested
craft, capable of rounding the Horn or of circumnavigating the globe;
and they came in streaked and picturesque from their long voyaging.

In the orange colored dawn which always comes through the mists of
that bay, the fishing fleet would crawl in under triangular lateen
sails, for the fishermen of San Francisco Bay were all Neapolitans who
brought their customers and their customs and sail with lateen rigs
shaped like the ear of a horse when the wind fills them and stained an
orange brown.

Along the water front the people of these craft met. "The smelting pot
of the races," Stevenson called it; and this was always the city of
his soul. There are black Gilbert Islanders, almost indistinguishable
from Negroes; lighter Kanakas from Hawaii or Samoa; Lascars in
turbans; thickset Russian sailors; wild Chinese with unbraided hair;
Italian fishermen in tam o' shanters, loud shirts and blue sashes;
Greeks, Alaska Indians, little bay Spanish-Americans, together with
men of all the European races. These came in and out from among the
queer craft, to lose themselves in the disreputable, tumbledown, but
always mysterious shanties and small saloons. In the back rooms of
these saloons South Sea Island traders and captains, fresh from the
lands of romance, whaling masters, people who were trying to get up
treasure expeditions, filibusters, Alaskan miners, used to meet and
trade adventures.

There was another element, less picturesque and equally
characteristic, along the water front. For San Francisco was the back
eddy of European civilization--one end of the world. The drifters came
there and stopped, lingered a while to live by their wits in a country
where living after a fashion has always been marvellously cheap. These
people haunted the water front or lay on the grass on Portsmouth
Square.

That square, the old plaza about which the city was built, Spanish
fashion, had seen many things. There in the first burst of the early
days the vigilance committee used to hold its hangings. There in the
time of the sand lot riots Dennis Kearney, who nearly pulled the town
down about his ears, used to make his orations which set the unruly to
rioting. In these later years Chinatown laid on one side of it and the
Latin quarter and the "Barbary Coast" on the other.

On this square men used to lie all