The City That Was | Page 4

the
most interesting and romantic, is a horde of refugees living among
ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that
peculiar city by the Golden Gate, have caught its flavor of the Arabian
Nights, feel that it can never be the same. It is as though a pretty,
frivolous woman had passed through a great tragedy. She survives, but
she is sobered and different. If it rises out of the ashes it must be a
modern city, much like other cities and without its old atmosphere.
San Francisco lay on a series of hills and the lowlands between. These
hills are really the end of the Coast Range of mountains, which stretch
southward between the interior valleys and the Pacific Ocean. Behind it
is the ocean; but the greater part of the town fronts on two sides on San
Francisco Bay, a body of water always tinged with gold from the great
washings of the mountain, usually overhung with a haze, and of
magnificent color changes. Across the bay to the north lies Mount
Tamalpais, about 3,000 feet high, and so close that ferries from the
waterfront take one in less than half an hour to the little towns of
Sausalito and Belvidere, at its foot.
Tamalpais is a wooded mountain, with ample slopes, and from it on the
north stretch away ridges of forest land, the outposts of the great
Northern woods of Sequoia sempervirens. This mountain and the
mountainous country to the south bring the real forest closer to San
Francisco than to any other American city. Within the last few years
men have killed deer on the slopes of Tamalpais and looked down to
see the cable cars crawling up the hills of San Francisco to the south. In
the suburbs coyotes still stole in and robbed hen roosts by night. The
people lived much out of doors. There is no time of the year, except a
short part of the rainy season, when the weather keeps one from the
fields. The slopes of Tamalpais are crowded with little villas dotted

through the woods, and these minor estates run far up into the redwood
country. The deep coves of Belvidere, sheltered by the wind from
Tamalpais, held a colony of "arks" or houseboats, where people lived in
the rather disagreeable summer months, coming over to business every
day by ferry. Everything there invites out of doors.
The climate of California is peculiar; it is hard to give an impression of
it. In the region about San Francisco, all the forces of nature work on
their own laws. There is no thunder and lightning; there is no snow,
except a flurry once in five or six years; there are perhaps half a dozen
nights in the winter when the thermometer drops low enough so that in
the morning there is a little film of ice on exposed water. Neither is
there any hot weather. Yet most Easterners remaining in San Francisco
for a few days remember that they were always chilly.
For the Gate is a big funnel, drawing in the winds and the mists which
cool off the great, hot interior valleys of the San Joaquin and
Sacramento. So the west wind blows steadily ten months of the year;
and almost all the mornings are foggy. This keeps the temperature
steady at about 55 degrees - a little cool for the comfort of an
unacclimated person, especially indoors. Californians, used to it, hardly
ever think of making fires in their houses except in a few days of the
winter season, and then they rely mainly upon fireplaces. This is like
the custom of the Venetians and the Florentines.
Give an Easterner six months of it, however, and he, too, learns to exist
without chill in a steady temperature a little lower than that to which he
was accustomed at home. After that one goes about with perfect
indifference to the temperature. Summer and winter, San Francisco
women wear light tailor-made clothes, and men wear the same
fall-weight suits all the year around. There is no such thing as a change
of clothing for the seasons. And after becoming acclimated these
people find it hard to bear the changes from hot to cold in the normal
regions of the earth. Perhaps once in two or three years there comes a
day when there is no fog, no wind, and a high temperature in the coast
district. Then follows hot weather, perhaps up in the eighties, and
Californians grumble, swelter and rustle for summer clothes. These rare
hot days are the only times when one sees women in light dresses on
the streets of San Francisco.
Along in early May the rains cease. At that time everything is green

and bright, and the great golden poppies,