inhabitants singing or dancing for joy on its sometimes rather
indefinite street corners. If there is happiness in sand, then, happily,
it was sandy. You might have climbed knee-deep up some parts of it and
slid down on the other side; you could have played at "hide-and-seek"
among its shifting undulations. From what is now known as Nob Hill you
could have looked across it to the heights of Rincon Point--and,
perchance, have looked in vain for happiness. Yet who or what is
happiness? A flying nymph whose airy steps even the sand can not stay
for long.

Down through this Happy Valley ran Market Street, a bias cut across the
city that was to be. Market Street is about all that saved that city
from making a checker-board of its ground-plan. Market Street flew off
at a tangent and set all the south portion of the town at an angle that
is rather a relief than anything else that I know of. Who wants to go on
forever up one street and down another, and then across town at right
angles, as if life were a treadmill and there were no hope of change
until the great change comes?

Happy Valley! I remember one cool twilight when a "prairie schooner,"
that was time-worn and weather-beaten, drifted down Montgomery Street
from Market Street, and rounded the corner of Sutter Street, where it
hove to. You know the "prairie schooner" was the old-time emigrant wagon
that was forever crossing the plains in Forty-nine and the early
Fifties. It was scow-built, hooded from end to end, freighted with goods
and chattels; and therein the whole family lived and moved and had its
being during the long voyage to the Pacific Coast.

On this twilight evening the captain of the schooner, assisted by a
portion of his crew, deliberately took down part of the fence which