THE MAN AT THE SEMAPHORE


In the early days of the Californian immigration, on the extremest point
of the sandy peninsula, where the bay of San Francisco debouches into
the Pacific, there stood a semaphore telegraph. Tossing its black arms
against the sky,--with its back to the Golden Gate and that vast expanse
of sea whose nearest shore was Japan,--it signified to another semaphore
further inland the "rigs" of incoming vessels, by certain uncouth signs,
which were again passed on to Telegraph Hill, San Francisco, where they
reappeared on a third semaphore, and read to the initiated "schooner,"
"brig" "ship," or "steamer." But all homesick San Francisco had learned
the last sign, and on certain days of the month every eye was turned to
welcome those gaunt arms widely extended at right angles, which meant
"sidewheel steamer" (the only steamer which carried the mails) and
"letters from home." In the joyful reception accorded to that herald of
glad tidings, very few thought of the lonely watcher on the sand dunes
who dispatched them, or even knew of that desolate Station.

For desolate it was beyond description. The Presidio, with its
voiceless, dismounted cannon and empty embrasures hidden in a hollow,
and the Mission Dolores, with its crumbling walls and belfry tower lost
in another, made the ultima thule of all San Francisco wandering. The
Cliff house and Fort Point did not then exist; from Black Point the
curving line of shore of "Yerba Buena"--or San Francisco--showed only
a stretch of glittering wind-swept sand dunes, interspersed with
straggling gullies of half-buried black "scrub oak." The long six
months' summer sun fiercely beat upon it from the cloudless sky above;
the long six months' trade winds fiercely beat upon it from the west;