San Francisco and became a teacher in the Union Street public school. It
was this admirable lady who made literature my first love; and to her
tender mercies I confided my maiden efforts in the art of composition.
She readily forgave me then, and was the very first to offer me
encouragement; and from that hour to this she has been my faithful
friend and unfailing correspondent.

South Park and Rincon Hill! Do the native sons of the golden West ever
recall those names and think what dignity they once conferred upon the
favored few who basked in the sunshine of their prosperity? South Park,
with its line of omnibuses running across the city to North Beach; its
long, narrow oval, filled with dusty foliage and offering a very weak
apology for a park; its two rows of houses with, a formal air, all
looking very much alike, and all evidently feeling their importance.
There were young people's "parties" in those days, and the height of
felicity was to be invited to them. As a height o'ertops a hollow, so
Rincon Hill looked down upon South Park. There was more elbow-room on
the breezy height; not that the height was so high or so broad, but it
_was_ breezy; and there was room for the breeze to blow over gardens
that spread about the detached houses their wealth of color and perfume.

How are the mighty fallen! The Hill, of course, had the farthest to
fall. South Parkites merely moved out: they went to another and a better
place. There was a decline in respectability and the rent-roll, and no
one thinks of South Park now,--at least no one speaks of it above a
whisper. As for the Hill, the Hillites hung on through everything; the
waves of commerce washed all about it and began gnawing at its base; a
deep gully was cut through it, and there a great tide of traffic ebbed
and flowed all day. At night it was dangerous to pass that way without a
revolver in one's hand; for that city is not a city in the barbarous