down Boston way, breathing a nomenclature never so freely used before
among mid-continent mountains, streets, schoolhouses, parks, and
gardens-all alive with the names of New England poets, philosophers, and
statesmen. Scarcely yet turned the half century in age, few such
charming cities as Denver have been made with fewer mistakes.

San Francisco at her birth and christening had for godfather neither
prince nor priest, nor any cultured coterie. The sandy peninsula, on
whose inner edge, at the cove called Yerba Buena, stood some hide and
tallow stores and fur depots which drew to them the stragglers that
passed that way, was about as ill-omened a spot as the one designated by
the snake-devouring eagle perched upon an island cactus as the place
where the wandering Aztecs should rest and build their city of Mexico.
San Francisco's godparents were but common humanity, traders and
adventurers, later gold-seekers and pot politicians, intelligent, bold,
and for the most part honest; few intending long to remain, few dreaming
of the great city to arise here; few caring how the town should be made,
if one were made at all. When was improvised an alcalde after the
Mexican fashion, and two boards of aldermen were established after the
New York fashion, and the high officials saw that they could now and
then pick up a twenty-five-dollar fee for deeding a fifty vara lot, if
so be they had on hand some fifty varas, they forthwith went to work to
make them by drawing lines in front of the cove and intersecting them at
right angles by lines running up over the hills, giving their own names,
with a sprinkling of the names of bear-flag heroes, not forgetting the
usual Washington and Jackson, leaving in the centre a plaza, the cove in
front to be filled in later. The streets were narrow, dusty in summer
and miry in winter. Spanish-American streets are usually thirty-six feet
wide. Winding trails led from the Presidio to the Mission, and from
Mission and Presidio to the cove. This was the beginning of San