are other hills of lesser importance as to altitude, but over their
tops extend long streets and broad avenues lined with the dwellings of
a contented and thrifty people. The business blocks and hotels, the
printing houses and railway and steamship offices, the stores and art
galleries, the places of amusement and lecture halls, the stores and
shops, the homes and the churches, fill all the spaces between those
hills in a compact manner and run around them and stretch beyond them,
and at your feet, as you stand on an eminence, is a panorama of life
which at once arrests your attention and enchains your mind. It was
all so different fifty or sixty years ago. According to the census
returns the population of San Francisco in 1850 was 34,000. In 1860
there was a gain of 22,802. In 1870 there were in the city 149,473
souls; while in 1880 there was a population of 233,959 including
30,000 Chinese. The census of 1890 gives an increase of 64,038 during
the decade, and the last enumeration shows that there has been a gain
of 44,785 in the ten years. If the towns across the bay and northward,
as well as San Mateo on the south, which are as much a part of San
Francisco as Brooklyn and Staten Island are of New York, there would
be a population of more than 450,000. The growth, as will be seen, is
steady, and San Francisco offers to such as seek a home within her
borders, all the refinements and comforts of life, all that ministers
to the intellect and the spiritual side of our nature as well as our
social tastes and desires.

There can be no greater contrast imaginable than that between the San
Francisco of 1846, when Commodore Montgomery, of the United States
sloop of war _Portsmouth_, raised the American flag over it, and the
noble city of to-day. And no one then in the band of marines who stood
on the Plaza as the flag was unfurled to the breeze by the waters of
the Pacific, in sight of the great bay, could have dreamed of the