owned with the palaces of
San Francisco; its long streets lie in regular bars of darkness, east
and west, across the sparkling picture; a forest of masts bristles like
bulrushes about its feet; nothing remains of the days of Drake but the
faithful trade-wind scattering the smoke, the fogs that will begin to
muster about sundown, and the fine bulk of Tamalpais looking down on San
Francisco, like Arthur's seat on Edinburgh.

Thus, in the course of a generation only, this city and its suburb have
arisen. Men are alive by the score who have hunted all over the
foundations in a dreary waste. I have dined, near the "punctual centre"
of San Francisco, with a gentleman (then newly married), who told me of
his former pleasures, wading with his fowling-piece in sand and scrub,
on the site of the house where we were dining. In this busy, moving
generation, we have all known cities to cover our boyish playgrounds, we
have all started for a country walk and stumbled on a new suburb; but I
wonder what enchantment of the Arabian Nights can have equalled this
evocation of a roaring city, in a few years of a man's life, from the
marshes and the blowing sand. Such swiftness of increase, as with an
overgrown youth, suggests a corresponding swiftness of destruction. The
sandy peninsula of San Francisco, mirroring itself on one side in the
bay, beaten on the other by the surge of the Pacific, and shaken to the
heart by frequent earthquakes, seems in itself no very durable
foundation. According to Indian tales, perhaps older than the name of
California, it once rose out of the sea in a moment, and sometime or
other shall, in a moment, sink again. No Indian, they say, cares to
linger on that doubtful land. "The earth hath bubbles as the water has,
and this is of them." Here, indeed, all is new, nature as well as towns.
The very hills of California have an unfinished look; the rains and the
streams have not yet carved them to their perfect shape. The forests
spring like mushrooms from the unexhausted soil; and they are mown down
yearly by the forest fires. We are in early geological epochs, changeful
and insecure; and we feel, as with a sculptor's model, that the author
may yet grow weary of and shatter the rough sketch.

Fancy apart, San Francisco is a city beleaguered with alarms. The lower
parts, along the bay side, sit on piles; old wrecks decaying, fish
dwelling unsunned, beneath the populous houses; and a trifling
subsidence might drown