alians, who tumbled over Telegraph Hill, had built as they
listed and with little regard for streets, and their houses hung crazily
on a side hill which was little less than a precipice. For the most part
the Chinese, although they occupied an abandoned business district, had
remade the houses Chinese fashion, and the Mexicans and Spaniards had
added to their houses those little balconies without which life is not
life to a Spaniard.

The hills are steep beyond conception. Where Vallejo Street ran up
Russian Hill it progressed for four blocks by regular steps like a
flight of stairs.

With these hills, with the strangeness of the architecture, and with the
green gray tinge over everything, the city fell always into vistas and
pictures, a setting for the romance which hung over everything, which
has always hung over life in San Francisco since the padres came and
gathered the Indians about Mission Dolores.

And it was a city of romance and a gateway to adventure. It opened out
on the mysterious Pacific, the untamed ocean, and most of China, Japan,
the South Sea Islands, Lower California, the west coast of Central
America, Australia that came to this country passed in through the
Golden Gate. There was a sprinkling, too, of Alaska and Siberia.
From his windows on Russian Hill one saw always something strange and
suggestive creeping through the mists of the bay. It would be a South
Sea Island brig, bringing in copra, to take out cottons and idols; a
Chinese junk with fan-like sails, back from an expedition after sharks'
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.

A MIXTURE OF RACES.

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 are all Neapolitans, who have brought
their costumes and sail with lateen rigs shaped like the ear of a horse
when the wind fills them and stained an orange brown.

The "smelting pot of the races" Stevenson called the region along the
water front, for here the people of all these craft met, Italians,
Greeks, Russians, Lascars, Kanakas, Alaska Indians, black Gilbert
Islanders, Spanish-Americans, wanderers and sailors from all th