the business quarters in an hour. Earthquakes are
not only common, they are sometimes threatening in their violence; the
fear of them grows yearly on a resident; he begins with indifference,
ends in sheer panic; and no one feels safe in any but a wooden house.
Hence it comes that, in that rainless clime, the whole city is built of
timber--a woodyard of unusual extent and complication; that fires spring
up readily, and served by the unwearying trade-wind, swiftly spread;
that all over the city there are fire-signal boxes; that the sound of
the bell, telling the number of the threatened ward, is soon familiar to
the ear; and that nowhere else in the world is the art of the fireman
carried to so nice a point.

Next, perhaps, in order of strangeness to the rapidity of its
appearance, is the mingling of the races that combine to people it. The
town is essentially not Anglo-Saxon; still more essentially not
American. The Yankee and the Englishman find themselves alike in a
strange country. There are none of these touches--not of nature, and I
dare scarcely say of art--by which the Anglo-Saxon feels himself at home
in so great a diversity of lands. Here, on the contrary, are airs of
Marseilles and of Pekin. The shops along the street are like the
consulates of different nations. The passers-by vary in feature like the
slides of a magic-lantern. For we are here in that city of gold to which
adventurers congregated out of all the winds of heaven; we are in a land
that till the other day was ruled and peopled by the countrymen of
Cortes; and the sea that laves the piers of San Francisco is the ocean
of the East and of the isles of summer. There goes the Mexican,
unmistakable; there the blue-clad Chinaman with his white slippers;
there the soft-spoken, brown Kanaka, or perhaps a waif from far-away
Malaya. You hear French, German, Italian, Spanish, and English
indifferently. You taste the food of all nations in the various
restaurants; passing from a French _prix-fixe_ where every one is
French, to a roaring German ordinary where every one is German; ending,
perhaps, in a cool and silent Chinese tea-house. For every man, for
every race and nation, that city is a foreign city; humming with foreign
tongues and customs; and yet each and all have made themselves at home.
The Germans have a German theatre and innumerable beer-gardens. The
French Fall of the Bastille is celebrated with squibs and banners, and
marching patriots, as noisi