The Fantastic City

On a windy day in June we sailed through the Golden Gate, every one on deck for the first glimpse of California. The Pacific trade wind whipped the waters, and the hills on either side were bare and brown. We had looked forward to green country after so many days at sea, not realizing that this was the dry season and that fresh greenery would come in fall and winter months to remain until summer again. Sand hills of San Francisco rolled away on our right, Telegraph Hill in bold relief at the turn of the bay shore line. Alcatraz rose high out of the water straight ahead, a rocky island fortress like a menace. It has since been graded many feet, and seems less ferociously on guard, although I thought this the most forbidding place I had ever seen. Not until the ship rounded the promontory of Telegraph Hill and I saw the long wharf extended out over the shallows, with animated people waving to welcome us, did I forget my disappointment in the thrill of arrival.

The coming of a steamer from Panama meant a holiday in San Francisco. The day a vessel was due there was a pervading expectancy. All eyes turned constantly to the lookout on Telegraph Hill, where a flag was run up as soon as she was sighted outside the Heads. As the ship sailed between the headlands to enter the bay, a gun was fired to announce her and the population trooped down to the wharf. That morning the wharf was crowded, and we finally saw my father frantically waving his hat as hundreds of others were doing in impersonal welcome. In a few moments he was on board and in a few more we were on shore.

It was an exciting scene, full of life and good-nature. Men and women stood or rushed about, called greetings or brandished papers with New York news. Some of the crowd followed bags of mail to the post-office. Ramshackle conveyances gathered passengers to drive them through unpaved streets into the city, straggling up Jackson, Commercial, Sacramento Streets — to the hills beyond — twenty dollars for a 'steamer load.' Crude as it all was, there was something vital and strong in this queer little city, and we liked it at once.

In a crazy hack — a four-wheeler driven by Mike Brannagan, afterward one of the town's notorious characters — we went to the International Hotel in Jackson Street. Bare white walls and black horsehair-covered furniture might have been discouraging, but after long weeks in ships' cabins, anything stationary seemed attractive.

That night at dinner we saw some of our fellow boarders. Meals at the International were on 'the American plan,' and not at all bad. Long tables were each adorned with a center line of pies, the line broken by an occasional jelly cake in a high glass dish with glass cover. Facing me sat a stout elderly woman in a low-necked red velvet dress with a diamond necklace and fingers literally covered with rings set with every variety of precious stone. It was the custom for gamblers to invest their winnings in diamonds rather than hoard them in a bank. Diamonds could be seen, while bank savings were a total loss so far as display was concerned. The lady had been lucky — or perhaps it was her husband.

Next to the red velvet lady, a tall young man tilted back and forth in his chair while he waited for dinner to appear. The wait was long. Presently his chair came down with a snap and he reached across the table to take a slab of pie. Then he tilted back again and ate pie from his fingers until roast beef arrived. Who could have guessed that in time he would be a very courtly diplomat, the American Minister to Japan? He was the young John F. Swift.

General Sherman's West Point manners were a contrast. He was living somewhere in 'rooms' and dining at the International occasionally with his friend, Captain Folsom, who had been a classmate at the Point — a way of living followed by many men, so that the table d'hôte was quite a center of the city's life. General Sherman was then manager of the San Francisco branch of a St. Louis bank, having resigned from the Army, although he was an officer of the National Guard. He told us that Mrs. Sherman and their son had recently gone home to Ohio after several years of San Francisco. They had lived in Green Street, not very comfortably, and he had built a house on Rincon Hill shortly before her departure. But she longed for her old home and he had sent her back in charge of his friend, William Aspinwall, of New York, returning from a trip to the Coast. Not long afterward, General Sherman, convinced that San Francisco had no great business future, closed his bank and joined his family in the East. Commodore Sloat bought the Rincon Hill house.

Long afterward in Monterey, we saw 'Sherman's rose tree,' and the ancient señorita said to have been his sweetheart when as a young lieutenant he had been stationed at the Monterey army post, in '47 and '48. The señorita was retícent and very old when we met her, but the rose tree still bloomed. According to the legend, she and the young officer had planted it together.

The day after our arrival, we explored downtown streets with Mr. Delessert for guide. I was keen to see Fort Gunnybags, with all its tragic associations and the implacable power it held over the city. For years after we came to San Francisco, the mere existence of the Vigilance Committee put the fear of law and retribution into the hearts of miscreants, or would-be miscreants thus transformed into orderly citizens; or abandoned to their ways, seeking more friendly fields.

Gunnybags was just a step from the International, and we turned in the little side doorway to climb a narrow flight of stairs. The judicial chamber looked like a country courthouse. On one wall hung a long blue satin banner lettered in gold — a gift to the Vigilance Committee from 'Ladies of Trinity Church' for its efforts toward 'the protection of life and property of citizens and residents of the city of San Francisco.' Strange evidence of the Vigilantes' high place in public regard.

On Kearney Street facing the Plaza, now Portsmouth Square, 'El Dorado' fascinated me. It was the most famous of the gambling-halls, a four-story brick building with an iron balcony across the front and 'El Dorado' in tall letters of gold. The upper stories were rooms occupied by miners and gamblers and women of the halls. The lower floor held the gilded splendor of the gambling-palace, where fortunes were won and lost at roulette, poker, and monte.

Before its doors and along Kearney Street in front of the adjoining Hall of Justice — once the Jenny Lind Theater — lounged gamblers in their distinguishing attire. A gambler in those days invariably wore a drooping mustache, wide felt hat, and Prince Albert coat, open to show a cable of gold stretched across a gorgeous waistcoat, to serve for watch-chain. Diamond shirt-studs flashed above the waistcoat of velvet or brocade, and usually a large solitaire was worn on the right hand in a perpetual state of display.

In the eighties it happened that we knew Bill Briggs, successful professional gambler of that later time who came to Shasta Springs for summer visits. Conservative guests avoided him, but others found him an engaging person, devoted to his small son and talking of everything but cards. His profession he left at home, and nothing could persuade him into a game while he sojourned among us. But he wore his mustache and wide-awake hat and the largest solitaire diamond I have ever seen in a ring. When he died, he left a fortune to the little son, then at a military school, and a reputation for square dealing.

While the taste of the gamblers was for diamonds, that of miners ran to enormous gold watches, the larger the better. They carried them attached to the conventional gold cables stretched across the waistcoat when arrayed in the urban splendor of boiled shirts for the Kearney Street parade; otherwise, carefully encased in chamois skin bags in the trousers pockets. Tucker, the jeweler, had a card in his window in Clay Street which read, 'One pound watches for sale here.' Undoubtedly they weighed all of that.

Shops were the happiest surprise. Low frame buildings were filled with lovely silks and laces from Paris and the smartest of bonnets. San Francisco shops have always been remarkable for the taste and richness of their wares and San Francisco women have always dressed well.

Mr. Delessert's mind was full of historical facts. Crossing the Plaza, he led us to the northwest corner, where in 1846 Commodore Sloat had raised the American flag before the house of the Spanish comandante — being under the impression that the United States was then at war with Mexico. The colorful pagoda of the Chinese telephone exchange stands there now, but when Mr. Delessert led us to the spot there were only ruins of the old adobe house built in 1776. It had been destroyed by one of the many fires which swept over the flimsy little city in the early years when water was scarce and the trade winds whipped the flames to their will. However, we regarded the ruins, and then turned down Washington Street past a line of Chinese shops, restaurants, and saloons, to Kearney and so northward to Broadway to see the new brick jail. A narrow iron stairway curved upward from the street to its high entrance where a few weeks before William T. Coleman had stood demanding delivery to the Vigilantes of the prisoners, Casey and Cora.

Just east of the jail in the lee of Telegraph Hill was the Chileño quarter. This had been Yerba Buena, the original settlement founded by Anza, the Spanish explorer who marched north from Arizona with his colonists in 1776. With him came the three priests, Father Junípero Serra, Father Crespi, and Father Palou, who established missions along the way. Father Palou lived longest at Mission Dolores, then across the sand dunes from Yerba Buena and now in a residence district of the city.

Yerba Buena, named for a 'good herb' — sweet mint, it was, which grew on the hillside — had been on the shore of a little cove of the bay, already in '56 filled in and built over. We thought it might have been about at Jackson and Montgomery Streets that Richard Dana, doing his 'Two Years Before the Mast,' stepped ashore in 1838 and met William Richardson, the first American resident of the place which was to be called San Francisco; the same Richardson lately shot to death by Cora, the gambler, who was hanged for his crime by the Vigilantes.

It was an alpine climb to the crest of Russian Hill, named for visitors who came down from Alaska early in the century and established a settlement at Fort Ross, north of San Francisco Bay, where the Russian River still flows. But at sunset the climb up the Hill from Broadway was worth while. Flimsy wooden staircases made it possible, and once on the crest the view was magnificent. One looked far across the dunes to the Golden Gate with sand and waters reflecting the red-gold light. At Fort Point, jutting out into the waters of the Gate, the flag flew over the Presidio, a little settlement founded by Anza and now the United States Army post. Officers' cottages faced the parade ground, at the head of which a low whitewashed adobe building gleamed — the old house of the comandante converted into an officers' club. Sand hills rolled away, beyond. I think it was in the eighteen-seventies that the Presidio hills were planted with their forests of eucalyptus and pines.

South across sand dunes was the white building of Mission Dolores — the church of St. Francis d'Assisi in the little Spanish village of Dolores.

Picturesque and interesting it all was, but we saw none of the perilous Wild West that Jack and I, at least, had anticipated. Back in 1850, San Francisco had been called 'the wickedest city in the world.' In my belief this was an unmerited distinction. Singapore, Shanghai, and Port Said surpassed it in downright evil, but lawless it surely had been before the Vigilantes. They had done their housecleaning well, however, and only once did we see a flash of the old Dangerous Dan spirit.

It was on an evening soon after our arrival. We were sitting in our rooms when the sound of commotion in the street below startled us and we rushed to windows with the thought of two-gun men abroad terrorizing the town. Nothing of that sort, however. We saw only excited citizens haranguing each other. Then we saw that one had fallen. They were carrying him into a doorway. He must be wounded, not dead, or they would have left him where he lay.

Father went downstairs to learn details and found his friend, Dr. R. P. Ashe, in the thick of the excitement. Judge Terry had stabbed a man, had been arrested by the Vigilantes, and taken to Fort Gunnybags. If the man died, he would be hanged — a judge of the Supreme Court! When we heard this, my wildest dream of the West seemed justified.

We had met Judge and Mrs. David Terry at the hotel, and for all his judicial eminence he seemed a stormy man, one who had for me a disquieting presence, with his tall, ungainly figure and restless eyes under shaggy brows. Before his California days he had been a 'dangerous man' in Texas. Mrs. Terry was a gentle little Southern woman and for her we felt deep sympathy in this crisis.

The day following, Dr. Ashe, then United States Navy agent, called and told us what had happened. He and Judge Terry, both members of the Law and Order Association opposed to the Vigilantes, had been sitting in his office when a man sought by the Vigilance Committee rushed in to demand protection. With him they started down Jackson Street toward the Armory of the National Guard where he could be safely held until the law considered his case. In front of the Hotel they met Hopkins, sheriff of the Vigilantes, with some of his men. Hopkins stepped forward and there was some altercation over the fugitive. Terry drew his gun. Hopkins seized it. Dr. Ashe cried 'Don't shoot' which Terry mistook for 'I'm shot' and believing Dr. Ashe had been attacked drew his knife and slashed. Hopkins fell and his men took the Judge into custody. If Hopkins should die, he would be hanged without a doubt. Here were elements of the wildest possible West. The whole town was keyed to a bewildered sense of outrage, yet never against the Vigilantes. In a few days the strain was broken. To the profound relief of the community and to Judge Terry, one safely assumes, Hopkins was out of danger and the prisoner at Fort Gunnybags was released. Poor little Mrs. Terry was nearly wrecked by the ordeal. She died a few years later, but Judge Terry pursued a long and stormy way to his own violent end.

The street scene was endlessly diverting and the city enchanted us from the first. In spite of shanties and unpaved streets, plank sidewalks and swirling dust, and a general look of having been hurriedly thrown together, it was metropolitan. Nothing small-town about it, but a touch of Old-World sophistication, and that charm I cannot describe, a prevailing gayety of spirit, youth in everything.

Street crowds were a collection of types in assorted costumes. Richly gowned women in velvet cloaks or black lace shawls of Broadway fashion; well-dressed men in light trousers and Prince Albert coats who might have stepped out of the Astor House; miners like stage characters; Mexicans with scarlet sashes, striped serapes slung over the shoulder; Spanish women in long, flaring skirts or cotton print, thickly pleated; and in Washington Street, where a row of Chinese shops faced the Plaza, meek-looking Orientals in blue blouses padded back and forth in their soft slippers; their queues swinging behind them. Gentlemen were wearing shovel beards a great deal, and wide felt hats which they swept off with a flourish to greet a lady. I might have forgotten what the well-dressed man was wearing in 1856 if I had not lately read a letter written that year by my father's friend, Judge Shafter, to his wife in Vermont. She was sailing with her children to join him in San Francisco; he informs her that he will be at the head of the pier when the steamer arrives, 'clad in light pants, buff vest, and snuff-colored frock coat with a broad-brimmed white sombrero.' (Life, Diary, and Letters of Oscar Lovel Shafter. Privately printed.)

Foreign-looking sailors who swaggered up from the wharves added their color to the scene, and there were many uniforms worn by officers from the military post at the Presidio, or the navy station on Mare Island, and from visiting battleships in the harbor. I have always regretted that I did not see the young Pierre Loti when he came to San Francisco as junior officer on a French warship arrived from Tahiti. He visited the Chinese Theater in Washington Street and there had a gorgeous inspiration of which he has somewhere written.

A long bench in front of him held a row of solemn Chinamen absorbed in the drama while their queues hung behind them. Loti's idea was to tie the queues together, two and two, and then slip out in the darkness. He may have done so; there is no evidence to the contrary. The thought of it has always evoked for me a subsequent scene of indescribable chaos.

We went, one day, down to Long Wharf, now in '56 part of the filled-in land which extended the city's water-front eastward from Montgomery Street. It was strange to see old ships built into the city streets; derelicts that had been left where they lay in the mud flats when the land was filled in, waves and lapping waters forever lost to them. The old Niantic of many voyages, perilous and historic, was a thriving hotel until fire destroyed it. Others were saloons and restaurants. I remember a sign hung from the prow of one: 'Coffee and doughnuts, $1.00. A square meal, $1.50. A regular gorge, $2.50.'

Probably the proprietor was some gay-hearted youth restauranting temporarily. We afterward knew a banker who had sold blackberries in the streets of Sacramento in '51. He had arrived with another adventurous youth from a New England college, and their first business venture was the blackberries picked from bushes growing wild along the Sacramento River. Newspaper cornucopias filled sold for a dollar apiece.

Nearly all the blithe young men we met had like adventures to relate. One had come out from Harvard in '49 to practice law, and had encountered periods of financial stress. In one of these he decided to sell his wardrobe which included an evening suit. Things went at top prices. Customers called in numbers. But no one wanted the 'claw-hammer.' It was left on his hands, so he wore it himself; disposed of all the other things and serenely went about his daily affairs in the sleek formality of black broadcloth, cut swallow-tail.

So quickly had the tent city grown, that in '56 the population was about seventy thousand and there were stable, handsome buildings here and there in the business district. The Parrott Block had lately been built at the corner of Montgomery and California Streets, where it stood in a solid, eternal sort of way, through the earthquake and fire of 1906. It was torn down only a few years ago to make way for a skyscraper, and if the men who demolish buildings have any sentiment, this was surely sad work. It was for so long a landmark, and into its building had gone so much of the dauntless spirit of the pioneers. The most accessible granite quarry in 1852 was in China, so John Parrott, the banker, sent to China for the gray granite of which his building was constructed. It was there cut into square blocks, each block marked with a Chinese character to designate its place in the structure, and so came across the Pacific. With it came Chinese laborers to put the building together, and a popular pastime of '52 was to stand and watch the coolies in their native garb and bare feet, silently matching blocks.

When it came time to return calls, Mother and I started out in Mike Brannagan's hack. It was proper then to spend not less than ten minutes with each hostess, and no ten minutes could have been so totally unproductive of anything but ennui. We sat on black haircloth and talked of the weather; of Dr. Scott's sermon on Sunday, or new silks at Belloc Frères'. Black haircloth was the prevailing fabric for parlor upholstery; red plush had not yet arrived. It was slippery stuff that kept one sliding and readjusting in a restless manner most inimical to poise. I'm sure it was a black haircloth chair in which the old man in one of Dickens's novels sat; the one of whom some one was always saying, 'Do pull Father up.'

Parlors of the period were ghastly places, anyway. No room could have been less suited to human habitation or use. I knew one — rather elegant it was — that had a black velvet carpet, patterned with deathly gray roses; black horsehair furniture, and a black-walnut center table with wax flowers under a glass globe. Perfect setting for the family funerals; and I believe on these melancholy occasions alone the 1860 parlor came into its own — really shone. I could fancy it waiting in grim static patience for its day.

Who that ever knew them could forget the what-nots? — graduated sets of shelves made to fit in corners, the top shelf just large enough to support proudly a polished seashell. And center-table books with heavy gilt-edge pages and steel engravings. They were placed at careful angles not to be disturbed. 'Wreath of Immortelles' was a favorite title, the 'immortelles' being sentimental selections of prose and verse suitable for the center table, not at all for reading.

These things persisted, I think, until the eighties in America, and their passing is one of many marks of progress I have seen in my life. It is always dangerously controversial to compare morals and ethics of the generations. Those of the eighteen-hundreds may have been better than those of today; they may possibly have been worse. But on the advancement of the race in matters of dress, common-sense, and things like what-nots, there is simply no argument.

We used Mike Brannagan's hack a great deal because the 'going' was bad for pedestrians and there were no street-cars. A bus-line that extended across Stockton Street from North Beach, down Kearney and Third Streets, eventually to South Park, was much patronized. The fare was twenty-five cents for one block or the whole distance. We had very few dimes to make change in those days, no nickels, and never a penny. I remember little silver five-cent pieces that were curios, not taken seriously at all: half-dimes, they were called. No one paid the slightest attention to nickels for years after they appeared; and it was in 1912, I think, that a Market Street department store placed pennies in circulation in California, with a campaign of marking prices and giving coppers in change, that was unpopular for months.

A quarter or less was always thrown off on a bill. 'Never mind the bits,' a tradesman would say cheerfully: a 'bit' was an eighth part of a dollar. Twenty-five cents was always 'two bits' as fifty cents was 'four bits,' and seventy-five,' six bits,' in everyday parlance.

When streetcars arrived the fare was ten cents. It is a matter of transportation history that San Francisco had the first cable cars, invented by one of her citizens, A. S. Halladie. The old Clay Street line from a turn-table at Kearney Street to one at Van Ness Avenue was built in the seventies. There was then the most engaging little line of balloon horse-cars out Pacific Avenue from Van Ness to Fillmore Street, much of the way through a waste of sand with blue lupine bushes, now all built over with beautiful homes. The cars were perfectly round, small, with mushroom roofs. Inside, a single seat extended all the way round. The fare was ten cents, children five, and infants free. No conductor; instead, a coin box at the window to a little platform where the driver stood. He would tie his reins about the brake and let the horse jog along while he made change.

But in the fifties we had only the bus-lines. One followed the Mission Road to Mission Dolores in the shadow of Twin Peaks. The old adobe church where Father Junípero Serra said mass in 1777 still stands, but the most enchanting and mournful little cemetery, planted with weeping willows, has been partly removed. There we found graves of some of the Spanish dons of a past century. Don Luis Arguello, Spanish Governor of California, was buried there; and his not distant neighbor, lately arrived, was James Casey, hanged by the Vigilantes.

Mission Dolores had seen a strange wedding in 1852 when Lola Montez, famous in London and Paris for her beauty, a king's favorite who had been called the 'Uncrowned Queen of Bavaria,' was married there to Pat Hull, San Francisco newspaper editor, late of Ohio. They met on the voyage to California when Lola, discouraged by London failures after her downfall in the Bavarian Revolution, with King Ludwig's favor lost, had left Europe in a sort of flight. She had danced in New York and then in New Orleans with indifferent success, and was in flight again from unhappiness, planning a tour of the world when she encountered the jovial Pat Hull whose keen mind and careless, easy ways appealed to her tired spirit. They were married soon after reaching San Francisco, but of course it couldn't last. Two years later, the restless lady sailed for Australia, leaving her husband — he was her third — to his editorial consolations.

We heard much light gossip of her; there had been no scandals in her San Francisco days. Every one who had seen her spoke of her startling beauty; a perfect figure, smooth brown hair, magnolia skin, and large gray eyes filled with expression. She would promenade Montgomery Street in a short black velvet jacket over a flaring skirt of silk, a broad hat with black lace falling over the brim. Word would go down the street, 'Lola Montez,' and every one stared in the most discreet manner possible. It was known that she had once struck her riding-whip across the face of a man too bold in his admiration.

Living in Stockton Street as Mrs. Hull, playing cards with Pat Hull's friends and seeing an occasional stray figure from her old world may have amused her for a while. She danced, too, for a brief season in the theater. But presently it all must have seemed insupportably dull, remembering her palace in Munich and the adulation of kings and princes; men like Liszt, Théophile Gautier, and Dumas who were her friends, and all the luxury of other days. At any rate, she suddenly packed her trunks one day, to sail away for Australia, and Pat Hull rarely spoke of her afterward.

Lola had a vivacious mind. I have still a rusty little book, 'The Arts of Beauty or Secrets of a Lady's Toilet. By Madame Lola Montez,' which reflects her wit. It was published in 1856, in the last unhappy period of her life. By that time Lola's opinion of men had fallen very low, or so one must assume reading 'Hints to Gentlemen on the Art of Fascination' with which her opus ends.

The beauty secrets are graciously revealed, but each of the fifty rules for gentlemen who would be successful gallants glitters with sarcasm like cut steel. Rule twenty is a sample:

Dance with all the might of your body and all the fire of your soul in order that you may shake all melancholy out of your liver; and you need not restrain yourself with the apprehension that any lady will have the least fear that the violence of your movements will ever shake anything out of your brains.

Less brilliant than Lola Montez, but still a flashing figure in the San Francisco scene, was Adah Isaacs Menken, who came from New Orleans to play 'Mazeppa' at Maguire's Opera House and was the toast of the town in the sixties. An indifferent actress, she had a lovely face, with masses of red-gold hair, and the figure of a Greek dancer. With her beauty she had, too, a melancholy charm alluring as music. I think it was a natural mood and not in the least induced by tribulation, but when she went to London, it so affected the young Swinburne that he wrote his poem, 'Our Lady of Sorrows' for her.

'Mazeppa' was melodrama with a grand climax that revealed the actress in a ride of death. In scant array she lay strapped to the back of a white horse which raced across the stage and up a zigzag mountain-path against the back-drop. Her gorgeous hair swept out behind her, and she was a magnificent picture. Audiences went wild over her, and thrilled young ladies who rarely met people of the theater would ask more privileged men friends, 'What is she like off the stage?'

She was a gentle young adventuress, it appeared, given to writing poetry. In London she published 'Infelicia,' a thin book of fragile verses Swinburne had praised. San Francisco friends were amazed when she married a pugilist, Johnny Heenan from Benicia, to whom poetry must have been forever a closed book, although he had his own distinction as 'the Benicia Boy of the Ring.' He went to England with Menken and returned without her.

In Paris, Menken was noted as an equestrienne. There she won the friendship of Dumas and his circle, ever cordial to beauty; and she died there while she was still young. On her gravestone in Père la Chaise is carved an appealing line, 'Thou Knowest.'

The white horse, named Mazeppa, Adah Menken left to one of our bachelor friends when she departed California. He rode it daily to his office in Sansome Street until one day it disappeared — stolen from the hitching-post. It was traced to a ship that had sailed for Australia that morning, and there was nothing to be done about it after that.

Hitching-posts were usually safe places to leave valuable possessions. There was a careless, common honesty in early days, after law-breakers were suppressed by the Vigilantes; an accepted standard of fair play in everything. A shooting affray would be preceded by a call, 'Defend yourself!' from the aggressor. The bitterness of feeling against Charles Cora, who was hanged with Casey by the Vigilantes, was due in part to the fact that Colonel Richardson was unarmed when attacked. Cora had approached him in Sansome Street with the cry, 'Defend yourself!' Colonel Richardson drew back and answered, 'I am not armed. Would you shoot an unarmed man?' And Cora had shot him down.

But of hitching-posts: It is recorded that a man carrying a bag of gold dust, valued at several thousand dollars, met a friend in Montgomery Street and was invited to enter a saloon for refreshment. 'Leave your bag outside,' the friend suggested. So the man placed his bag on the square top of a hitching-post and went in and had a drink. When he came back for the bag, there it rested on the post with a sheet of paper over it, and on this a silver dollar with the written words, 'To help along.'

Sunday was a sort of fête day, with shops all open and gambling-halls going merrily; a general air of festivity. Theaters gave matinée and evening performances; but these and the fashionable street promenade of week-days were on Sundays given over to the unfashionable element — miners, gamblers, and ladies of the dance-halls.

This promenade, where on other days one met friends and loitered through the shops, extended from Sutter Street along Montgomery to Clay, up Clay to Kearney Street and across the Plaza to Washington, and so up to Stockton Street, where were the city's most attractive homes. I remember the small chateau with cupola and mansard roof built by Captain Roberts at Stockton and Washington Streets, with high iron fence about the garden, where iron dogs stood guard. He was a retired sea captain, the father of Theodore Roberts, afterward famous as an actor and star of the Hollywood firmament. I recall very well the sympathy felt for the Roberts family when young Theodore 'went on the stage.' It wasn't exactly a disgrace, but it was very sad.

Along this route were the shops of Belloc Frères, the Ville de Paris, and at Sacramento and Kearney Streets, Davidson and Lane's, where Raphael Weill, a handsome black-eyed French boy whom every one liked, was clerk. In time he owned Davidson and Lane's and later founded the White House, which was then the 'A. T. Stewart's' of San Francisco, and became a sort of social rendezvous on shopping mornings when it stood at Post and Kearney Streets. His career as a merchant was unique, I think. He became a patron of the arts, a connoisseur and an epicure whose dinners, given in the Red Room of the Bohemian Club, were a gastronomic education. During a long life in San Francisco, he was host to many of the celebrities who came that way. When they were dined by the Bohemian Club, he arranged the menu. There was a breakfast for Bernhardt back in the lithe, slender days when 'An empty cab drew up at the curb and Sarah Bernhardt stepped out of it'; a dinner for Coquelin the Elder, who brought beautiful Jane Hading from Paris to play Molière in Mission Street. Wines for this event were imported from France weeks before the guest of honor reached California. Dinners for Modjeska and her husband, Count Bozenta; for Paderewski, for Ysaye — this followed by a reception for the violinist in the old club at Post Street and Grant Avenue, when Horace Platt, the club's president, made a speech and said he was sorry that there wasn't a chair for every one in the crowded rooms, but that there were, nevertheless, three cheers for every one, which was accounted a happy specimen of Horace Platt's well-known wit. Anyway, carefully translated, it made Ysaye relax his heavy features into a smile.

All of these bring to mind another Red Room dinner of a much later time for which Raphael Weill directed the menu, when Melba was guest of honor and young Joe Thompson, Kathleen's brother, made a memorable speech. He had lately been appointed a member of the jinks, or entertainment committee of the club, with the duty of arranging programs and persuading talented members to perform, and in his speech told of difficulties he encountered. He said that while men who could sing were all willing to render solos, he found that none was willing to sing in the chorus as an inglorious member of the ensemble. Collecting a chorus was desperate work. He'd reached a point, he said, where meeting strangers he'd discover himself appraising their 'jinks' possibilities. 'So,' he concluded, 'when I met our charming guest of honor this evening [here he bowed at Madame Melba, acknowledging a lovely lady] when I met Madame Melba this evening, my first thought was, "Can she sing? If so, will she consent to sing in the chorus?"'

The post-office, at Washington and Stockton Streets in the fifties was the turning-point for promenaders. It was in the former residence of W. D. M. Howard, where Colonel Geary, as postmaster, had introduced order and efficiency. Before his day, an engaging informality had prevailed in the handling of mail. One postmaster, who found it too confining to sit at a window, would fill his hat with letters and shut up shop. Then, as he met the addressees in his walks abroad, he would remove his hat and deliver the mail.

Our Eastern post was, of course, several weeks coming to us by way of Panama, so we thrilled to important events of the world nearly a month late. In 1860, this time was shortened by the Pony Express, with a proper increase of postage to five dollars a letter. The ride from Sacramento to St. Joseph, Missouri, two thousand miles, was covered in nine days. Business men could send letters to associates in 'St. Joe,' who would telegraph messages to the East for them, and they were the principal patrons of the service.

The day the first Pony mail started East was an exciting one in Sacramento, and my father, with many other San Francisco men, went up to the Capital to see the service inaugurated. At a given hour the slim young rider — his name was Henry Roff — swung into his saddle, in front of the express office, and at a signal was off like a shot while cannon boomed a parting salute and the citizenry cheered. They were courageous knights, these young riders of the Pony Express, who went unarmed to save weight for their horses — game little mustangs that would sometimes drop from exhaustion when the run of ten miles, at an unbroken gallop, was ended.

It has often been told how the riders would call their coming when they approached a station, where horses were changed. The fresh mount would be rushed out to stand ready at the side of the road and, without breaking speed, a rider would swing from one horse to the other and dash on. I have seen the mail start from the Sacramento office. The bags were slung across the saddle and the spirited, intelligent horse stood ready to go like a shot the instant his rider's foot touched the stirrup. Irresistibly thrilling, to see the sudden dash down the street and know that the mail thus starting went with unbroken speed across two thousand miles of wilderness.

One of the popular Sunday resorts of San Francisco was Russ Gardens on the Mission Road; never fashionable, but the setting for all national celebrations. National groups were clannish. At the Irish picnic on St. Patrick's Day, for example, only sons and daughters of Erin were gathered. Caledonian picnics, and German picnics, French celebrations on Bastile Day, and Spanish fiestas were given there, and the races never mixed. But on Fourth of July they were all represented to hear the Declaration of Independence read and enjoy the spectacle of fireworks in the evening. Admission Day, to commemorate California's entrance to the Union as a State, in 1850, found them all loyal Californians at a grand celebration in Russ Gardens. Henry Russ made a fortune out of the resort and built the Russ House at Bush and Montgomery Streets, long the favorite hotel of miners and ranchers.

Farther out on Mission Road was 'The Willows.' Here there was a zoo, with bear pit and a pond of clamorous sea lions among the attractions. The gardens were rather pretty with lawns and flowers and a little winding stream fringed with willows, which was to be their destruction. In the winter of '61 there were extraordinarily heavy rains, and they flooded the little winding stream until it washed away the gardens, and they were never rebuilt. But before this catastrophe, 'The Willows' on Sunday afternoons was crowded with a cosmopolitan collection of visitors, most of whom had attended church that morning.

For, in spite of Sunday festivities, San Francisco was never a godless city. There were always churches. People worshiped in consecrated tents before buildings were erected. But the godless element was naturally most conspicuous, and a certain insouciant flourish to the ungodliness lent it grace. Not unnaturally, writers of romance have gone to the gilded palaces of sin, so called, for drama and color in the West, rather than to a lecture on Seneca at the First Unitarian Church, for example. Yet Thomas Starr King gave weekly lectures at the church on the old philosophers and they were attended by large and attentive audiences. Much of their success was due to the young clergyman's magnetic personality, but the fact remains that many San Francisco citizens passed evenings with Socrates and Goethe, while others made history and fiction in the gilded palaces. There was a certain happy leavening influence of each element upon the other.

Dr. King was a fascinating speaker, a young Boston clergyman who in the three short years of his residence placed the stamp of his eager young personality on California history. In '60 and '61, when there was talk of California's secession from the Union, he traveled through the State making speeches of loyalty to the Government; and his impassioned patriotism won the day for the Union in San Francisco when civil war was declared. He it was who organized the California branch of the Sanitary Committee which contributed over a million dollars of the five millions subscribed by the country. Bret Harte was one of his devoted friends.

The little iron church of Trinity and the village meeting house effect of Grace Church dated back to '49. The 'Iron Church' in Pine Street above Montgomery had actually been built of sheet-iron when lumber was scarce and bricks worth their weight in silver. When new Trinity was built at Post and Powell Streets, Bishop Kip desired to introduce there a vested choir, as proper in the largest Episcopal Church in the State. It lasted just one Sunday, for the following morning an irreverent press referred to 'Kip's Melodeon and Performing Boys,' and the name caught. The melodeon was abandoned until long afterward a vested choir was successfully established in St. Luke's.

We were members of Grace Church, and followed it from the meeting-house to the brick cathedral on the steep California Street declivity of Nob Hill, where standing above it one looked through open arches of the belfry to the bay and Contra Costa Hills far beyond. Below it on California Street was 'old St. Mary's,' with its tall steeple, standing at the gateway to Chinatown, one of the surviving landmarks of the old city.

At the southern base of Nob Hill rose another tall steeple, that of the First Congregational Church, where Dr. Stone preached for many years. Both Dr. and Mrs. Stone were important figures in the San Francisco scene, and the church was for long a significant influence. Mrs. Stone was a lady of interesting ancestry, descended from Dr. Bertody, distinguished Persian physician of the eighteenth-century who was summoned to France by Louis XV. He married in Paris and founded a family which in time migrated to America. Mrs. Stone and her sons were all distinguished-looking, with the faint print of the Orient in their finely featured faces.

We found, as others did, countless discomforts in the new city, but no one brooded over them. San Franciscans have always had a gift for taking life lightly, whatever it brings. I don't mean frivolously, but with an unaffected lightness of spirit, as they took the disaster of earthquake and fire in 1906. In the fifties we laughed at amusing makeshifts for what were everyday comforts 'back East.'

There were the board-paved streets that developed wicked slivers, fatal to flounces. Once in Sacramento Street, my skirt caught on one and yards of lace were ripped from the dust ruffle. I had to tear it off and leave it there.

There was the limited water supply. Baths in hotels were twenty-five cents apiece extra on the bill, and for a large family this could amount to an imposing sum. In these early days most of the city's water was brought across the bay from Sausalito in boats built for the purpose, and was sold at three dollars a barrel in the streets. The water-cart man called at houses to replenish barrels as the ice-man calls with ice.

For illumination, there were only candles and oil lamps in the residence district. But in hotels we found gas, and in the theaters were gas footlights with shields like a row of scallops across the stage. An actress watched her skirts when she took a call, and there had been terrifying accidents when flaring tarlatan drifted into the lights.

And we knew the dread of fire. Already there had been what the newspapers called disastrous conflagrations when blocks of tent houses and wood shanties had burned away and the whole city had been menaced; so that the sound of the fire-bell filled people with alarm. It was rung from a tower of the City Hall on the Plaza, where the fire lookout was stationed. A man in the tower watched night and day, and whenever a suspicious cloud of smoke or flash of flame appeared, he guessed the locality and tapped out on his bell the number of the ward. Each ward had an engine-house and a volunteer company of firemen, who ran from their homes or business to answer the calls. Most of the young men of the city belonged to some company and always 'ran with the machine.' Every citizen knew the ward numbers and could locate the fire when the taps sounded.

The history of the San Francisco fire department is filled with romance and adventure, and no one could speak of it without recalling Lily Hitchcock. She was the daughter of a retired army officer, a flashing, brilliant girl, who for some favor or service was made honorary member of one company. She always wore her badge, proudly pinned to her ball gowns, as it was to her street dress, and she never failed to answer a call for her company, if she had to leave a dance to do it. Lily Hitchcock married Howard Coit, caller of the Stock Exchange in the sixties, and afterward went to Paris to live. Her name is still honored in San Francisco's fire department.

But not the dread of fire nor the high cost of bathing seriously affected our spirits, and we enjoyed life tremendously. There were many parties and we went often to the theater.

Sometimes we walked down to the docks, where ships from all over the world brought strange cargoes and strange crews. I never counted clipper ships that lay at anchor like so many great birds resting with folded wings while busy little tugboats, ferry-boats, and schooners fussed about them, but Richard Henry Dana is authority for the statement that in '59 there were more than could be counted in the harbor of Liverpool or of London.

Dana's book, 'Two Years Before the Mast,' was still a best seller when he made a last visit to California that year, and in later editions he included a chapter, 'Twenty-Four Years After' (Two Years Before the Mast. Houghton Mifflin Company), with a vivid picture of the city as it then appeared:

"When I looked from my windows over the city of San Francisco, with its storehouses, towers and steeples, its courthouse, theaters and hospitals; its daily journals; its well-filled learned professions; its fortresses and lighthouses; its wharves and harbor with their thousand-ton clipper ships more in number than London or Liverpool sheltered that day;... when I looked across the bay and beheld a beautiful town on the fertile, wooded shores of the Contra Costa, and capacious freighters and passenger carriers to all parts of the great bay and its tributaries with lines of their smoke on the horizon — when I saw all these things and reflected on what I once was and saw here and what now surrounded me, I could scarcely keep my hold on reality at all...."

Of Grace Church on an August Sunday of 1859, he wrote:

"The congregation at the Bishop's church (Bishop Kip) was precisely like one you would meet in New York, Philadelphia or Boston. To be sure the identity of the service makes one feel at once at home, but the people were alike, nearly all of the English race though from all parts of the Union. The latest French bonnets were at the head of the chief pews...."

One of the bonnets was mine.

Interesting travelers arrived on every steamer — the whole world's attention seemed turned to California — and in the harbor were usually anchored several foreign warships, just calling. Officers of British ships were often our guests. Some of them my husband had known when he served in 'The Buffs,' and others were glad to meet a one-time British officer in this strange, remote place. Lady Franklin, widow of the explorer, Sir John Franklin, arrived unexpectedly, one day on the little British war sloop Plumper, from British Columbia. She had been in Victoria awaiting news from a ship sent to Arctic waters in the hope of finding trace of her husband, lost years before seeking the 'Northwest Passage.' Poor Lady Franklin! She spent a fortune and years of her life sending ships to the frozen North, before all the searching was finally rewarded and the lost expedition was traced. This time there had been only disappointment, and it was no wonder she cared little about meeting people or accepting social courtesies. The Plumper had been ordered to bring her to San Francisco, where she took the Panama steamer on her long journey back to England. She had not made herself popular on the Plumper, but she was old and tired. Still, after meeting her, to encounter a detached manner and uninterested glance from beneath the quilted black satin hood she wore in place of a bonnet, I could understand the little middie who confessed to me she had so many airs he'd 'chewed up her India rubber for her!' — the soft rubber eraser from her writing-table. A peculiarly satisfying performance, I fancy, with much outraged feeling worked off on the rubber.

Lady Franklin's niece was with her, acting as her secretary. I've forgotten her name, but she was far more gracious than her aunt, and I wondered, of the rubber, if it could have been this really pleasant person who was inconvenienced by its loss, and not Lady Franklin at all.

Maguire's Opera House was the leading theater, and there we saw Mrs. John Wood in 'Love's Disguises.' She was a handsome woman and a clever comédienne with a following of devoted admirers, among whom was Judge John S. Hager. He would watch her performance from a second-tier stage box, and, when she was in range, drop a white japonica flower at her feet. In the next scene Mrs. Wood would appear with the flower in her hair, and the audience enjoyed this lightly romantic episode, not at all unusual in the theater then.

Eventually Mrs. Wood decided to divorce Mr. Wood, who was a member of her company. She charged him with intemperance and the suit was heard in Judge Hager's court. To the profound surprise of every one concerned, he decided it against her, and the japonica flowers fell at her feet no more. In 1915, I was startled to read of Mrs. Wood's death in England. For so long I had thought of her as a figure of the dead past, not among the living.

Our friend Mrs. Hayne played in 'The Hunchback' at the Metropolitan Theater, and at once became a favorite in San Francisco, as she had been in New York. She had made her New York début as Julia in 'The Hunchback' at the old Bowery Theater early in the fifties and critics predicted a brilliant future. But she married Dr. Hayne and sailed away for the gold country. I remember her lovely hair, rich golden brown and parted smoothly in the middle, drawn down over her ears. It would never stay properly sleek and flat; there was always a fluff of life about it. She died soon after the Civil War while she was still young and vividly charming, and left a little daughter, who grew up to marry one of the Langhornes of Virginia.

Lotta we saw when she returned from New York, a captivating little creature, méchante enfant in all her parts, and not to be resisted. I liked her best as the Marchioness in the rag-tag dress of a London slavey, high buttoned shoes without a button on them. She had an inimitable way of slithering about in them, and kept the house in a ripple of mirth with her comedy. One rarely heard of her outside the theater. She lived almost in seclusion with her mother, Mrs. Crabtree.

Lotta's Fountain, her gift to the city which stands at the intersection of Market and Kearney Streets, recalls her to a present generation of Californians. It is a recklessly ornate monument of black iron which astonishes the sophisticated visitor. But if it isn't art, it has a certain grace of sentiment and tradition. Interesting events have had their setting at Lotta's Fountain.

One memorable night Tetrazzini sang there — on Christmas Eve, 1910. The converging streets were black with people and the windows of near-by buildings were all filled. Those who heard her said her silver voice seemed to rise to the stars through the still night; and the utter silence of the great crowd in the dark streets was curiously thrilling. The singing was Tetrazzini's Christmas gift to the city which had first welcomed her to America.

Living at the International Hotel had prolonged itself because of the difficulty of finding a suitable house. Father deferred building a home while so much of his time was passed on surveying expeditions, and we finally decided to move over to the more homelike Oriental Hotel in Market Street where Bush and Battery meet.

The Government land surveys sometimes took my father as far south as Los Angeles, and at one time he owned a ranch covering much of the land on which Hollywood is now built. His service to the State was recognized by the California Society of Engineers so recently as October 24, 1926, when they formally gave the name of Ransome's Point to one of the spurs of Mount Diablo. It is part of the State Park on this peak of the Coast Range of which in 1851 my father established the basic and meridian lines. On these lines the surveys of most of California and all of Nevada are founded.

We were in England then, and he wrote to us of the Mount Diablo expedition in a letter now preserved in the Bancroft Library of the University of California. He described the panorama of rivers, mountains, and bay that stretched before him when he stood on what is now Ransome's Point and looked far westward to the Golden Gate and San Francisco hills. The empty plains below, he noted, had 'the appearance of being susceptible to a high state of cultivation.' They are now the rich farm lands of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys which send their products to the world's markets.

From the bay to Mount Diablo there has been built a broad highway and the state road winds around the mountain to its crest. One may drive there and back for a day's outing from the city. But in '51 the now thickly populated eastern shore of the bay was thinly settled; a little town at Oakland, the Gonzales Ranch, a few other Spanish ranches, then a wilderness to the settlement of Benicia at the far eastern end of the bay, where the United States had established a military station. My father's surveying party made the trip to Benicia by boat, and at Benicia Barracks, Major Allen furnished horses, mules, and equipment for the expedition. A little river boat took the explorers eight miles up a creek toward the base of the mountain. A third of the way to the summit, they made their camp and the rest of the distance was covered on foot, the men carrying their instruments. Herds of elk and antelope crossed their way. Wild country it was, where, with all his prophetic vision, my father could not foresee golf links and a country club.

Father was the son of a soldier of the Revolution, and was born in Connecticut in the year 1800. He was tall and very distinguished-looking, and had the fineness of character that seemed bred in that generation of Americans. I remember so many of his friends who were from New England and the South, Judge McMillen Shafter, Judge McAllister, William T. Coleman, and a dozen others, all tall, fine-looking men with a certain nobility of spirit.

When my father died in San Francisco in 1874, his friend Judge Noah Swayne, of Washington, the friend also of Lincoln and of Grant, wrote to my mother:

Take him altogether, he was the noblest human being that ever came within the circle of my personal knowledge. The magnitude and power of his mind were equal to those of his body. He was disinterested and generous to a fault. His whole heart seemed to be without a bad fiber, and his whole nature without a blemish.

This, of course, is in the fluorescent style of the time; but it is true that my father was one of the men who, with far vision and without self-interest, laid foundations for California's empire.

The Oriental was very much of a social center because of its ballroom where dances were given. It stood on Market Street at the foot of Bush, opposite and a little below St. Patrick's Church and Orphan Asylum, which were removed to make way for the Palace Hotel. Directly across the street, in a sand lot now covered by a skyscraper, Peter Donahue manufactured boilers with incessant din.

The Oriental was a two-story frame building with long galleries across the front. Partitions between rooms were of cloth covered with paper which necessitated the carrying-on of any intimate conversation in whispers. But in spite of these slight disadvantages, we were happy there, and found what was known as the élite of the city sharing the discomforts. In the dining-room, one long table was reserved for men who took their meals there and lodged elsewhere.

At its head sat William T. Coleman, chief of the Vigilance Committee and usually on his right sat Isaac Bluxome, the Secretary, known as 'Sec'ty 33,' which he signed to all the Committee's documents. With them occasionally was Dr. Beverly Cole, physician of the Vigilantes, a good-looking young man with courtly manners. His daughter in after years married Major McClung, of the Army, who met a curiously tragic death. It was early in the present century when Mrs. Howard Coit, then living in Paris, came home for a visit. She had been Lily Hitchcock, the most dashing belle San Francisco ever knew, with her gay spirits and spectacular independence. Major McClung, an old admirer and friend, was calling on her in her rooms at the Palace, when suddenly and unannounced the door of her sitting-room opened and there entered a highly excited young man, son of an old Rincon Hill family known to them both. Mrs. Coit rose in surprise. While she stood staring, the young man drew a gun and, with incoherent words about some business deal, shot Major McClung to death in his chair.

Not long ago the tragic end of William T. Coleman's son recalled to me the Vigilantes. Robert Coleman and George DeLong, of New York, were killed by bandits in the Balkans in 1924 while on a motor tour of the country. Robert Coleman had inherited his father's good looks. The latter had been the handsomest man in his class at the University of St. Louis back in the forties as the son was at Yale in the eighteen-nineties, although neither, I'm sure, coveted the distinction.

One delightful lady at the Oriental unconsciously afforded us much entertainment, discreetly concealed. She was Mrs. Greenough, of Washington, who had come West to visit her daughter, the wife of Captain Treadwell Moore, of the Presidio. Mrs. Greenough had known Washington society for many years, and would talk of events back in Dolly Madison's reign, and other remote periods, until we wondered how old on earth she must be! She looked fifty, or seventy. Her age became a matter of wide speculation and bets were made on it but they remained unsettled. Mrs. Greenough persistently evaded determining statements and she departed for Washington with her age an unrevealed secret.

Not long afterward she was called as a witness in the Limanteur Land Case and returned to San Francisco to testify. 'She will have to tell her age, now,' we grimly gloated.

The day she was questioned, her amiably curious friends filled the courtroom — all tense with expectancy when she took the stand. 'How old are you, Mrs. Greenough?' counsel asked. Every one leaned a little forward.

Mrs. Greenough looked placidly about her, and then with dignified finality answered, 'Of sufficient age to testify.' The bets were never paid.

Mrs. Moore, who had been Florence Greenough, was a gay, pretty woman who often asked us to dances at the post. She was a close friend of Mrs. Hall McAllister, leader of San Francisco society in the sixties and seventies, as her brother-in-law, Ward McAllister, was in New York's fashionable set. But with a difference. All of the San Francisco McAllisters were blessed with a sense of humor.

After he came to live in San Francisco, Ward McAllister, Jr., once told me that, if he walked down Kearney Street with a young lady, her social position was thereby assured; and he was quite simple and sincere about it. Ward, Jr., took his title of 'the Crown Prince' a bit seriously when we bestowed it in a spirit of friendly fun, but he was a sweet and amiable soul with none of the arrogance that made his father an implacable arbiter. The arbiter himself had adorned the bar of San Francisco for a year or two, but before our advent had returned to what the Western press liked to refer to as 'the effete East.'

Judge and Mrs. McAllister had brought their family from Georgia in the earliest fifties, and except the son Ward, they all lived in a spacious mansion in Stockton Street. There were Harriet, the daughter, and three sons; Hall with his wife, Cutler with his wife, and the Reverend Marion McAllister, who never married and became pastor of the Church of the Advent out in the Mission District.

They gave the merriest parties in the Stockton Street house. At Christmas and New Year's it was filled with young people. The large old-fashioned parlors were lit with many candles, and Cutler McAllister led the merry-making. We played 'Blindman's Buff,' danced 'Old Dan Tucker,' and the Virginia Reel. One evening we had charades, with 'The Seasons' represented by men of the party. Hall McAllister was Spring with a wreath of artificial flowers on his head and a scarf draped over his black broadcloth. Judge Hager in a toga, carrying a feather fan, was Summer. Autumn was presented by Arthur Goddefroy, who carried a pumpkin, and Cutler McAllister in an overcoat was Winter. Lieutenant McPherson, of the Presidio, wore a cotton-wool beard to suggest Father Time, and Billy Botts was the New Year with infant's cap and bib, carrying a rattle. Innocuous entertainment, possibly, but hardly more so, I should say, than one-stepping through an evening in the modern manner.

We often raced through 'Fox-and-Geese' at these parties, and sometimes Mrs. Hall McAllister sang for us. She had a lovely voice, and was altogether one of the most fascinating women San Francisco society has known.

Harriet McAllister went to New York early in the sixties and there married her cousin, Sam Francis. When the Prince of Wales visited America, she danced with him at a ball and wrote letters about it to the family; of how she found the Prince really very much of a gentleman, as though the McAllisters had their own standards. Ward McAllister, Jr., was a great beau, but he never married, developing, instead, into one of the perennial bachelors of the Pacific Union Club, where he made his home. Of these late years I remember an incident, entirely trivial but delectably characteristic.

When he had become a famous figure of finance, Senator William A. Clark, of Montana, visited San Francisco and was a guest at the club. The whole country was talking of the Copper King, but Mr. McAllister, it appeared, had never heard of him — or so he wished to imply — and it amused him to tell it as much as it did me to hear it.

'I was in the lounge the other afternoon [he related], when one of the servants whispered, "That's Senator Clark, sir, over there." "Don't know him," I answered. There he sat [giving a lightly scornful side glance], but I didn't know him.'

Poor Ward McAllister had a sad experience in the 1906 disaster. A stroke of paralysis had rendered him speechless and he was a patient in the McNutt Hospital. When the fire began to sweep northward from the Mission District, where it started, patients were hurriedly removed, and by the time his relatives could reach it, the hospital was deserted; no one left to tell them his whereabouts.

It happened, in the confusion of the morning, that strangers took charge of him and he could not tell them his name or for whom to send. So, with other patients, he was taken to Fort Mason, from where nurses accompanied them by boat to the Navy Hospital at Mare Island. It was days before his troubled family found him.

One always heard laughter where Cutler McAllister passed, but his wit was the light, inconsequential sort that passes with the moment. He had amusing names for most of his friends. Sylvester Mowery, of New York, who had been in Arizona before he came to California, was always 'Sylvester the Magnificent, Prince of Arizona.'

He delighted to tell of an incident at the Pacific Club the first 'gentlemen's club' of San Francisco, which took itself a bit seriously. Most of the important men of the community belonged to it and the club-rooms in Commercial Street were fairly luxurious. They had formerly been Steve Whipple's gambling-hall, fitted up with what was then considered a degree of gilded splendor. One evening, when dignified members were grouped in the lounge, a miner in blue shirt and high boots entered and looked about, slightly bewildered. One of the servants went over to him and told him he had strayed into a private club.

'A private club, eh?' he answered. 'Well, this used to be Steve Whipple's place and I see the same old crowd around.'

The Pacific Club soon moved from Steve Whipple's old quarters to rooms in the Parrott Block, and there a tragic accident occurred. The rooms were over those occupied by the offices of Wells-Fargo and Company's Express. One day at the noon hour, when the club dining-room was filled, a package of nitro-glycerine exploded in the express office beneath, wrecking the club's dining-room and killing several of the members.

Eventually the Pacific Club combined with the Union Club, and the Pacific Union, housed in the huge brownstone palace built by the bonanza king, James Flood, on Nob Hill, is now the millionaires' club of San Francisco.

The Bohemian Club was not founded until the seventies, by actors, artists, and writers who met in rooms over the California Market and arranged entertainments for themselves and their friends which they called 'High Jinks' in the slang of the day. 'Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines' was a popular song, and I fancy the word was derived from that. However, it has gained greatly in dignity, and the Bohemian Club's Midsummer Jinks, in the Cazadero redwood forest, are famed pageants of rare beauty and high art.