WAITING FOR THE SHIP.

A FORT POINT IDYL.


About an hour's ride from the Plaza there is a high bluff with the
ocean breaking uninterruptedly along its rocky beach. There are several
cottages on the sands, which look as if they had recently been cast up
by a heavy sea. The cultivated patch behind each tenement is fenced in
by bamboos, broken spars, and driftwood. With its few green cabbages and
turnip-tops, each garden looks something like an aquarium with the water
turned off. In fact you would not be surprised to meet a merman digging
among the potatoes, or a mermaid milking a sea cow hard by.

Near this place formerly arose a great semaphoric telegraph with its
gaunt arms tossed up against the horizon. It has been replaced by an
observatory, connected with an electric nerve to the heart of the great
commercial city. From this point the incoming ships are signalled, and
again checked off at the City Exchange. And while we are here looking
for the expected steamer, let me tell you a story.

Not long ago, a simple, hard-working mechanic had amassed sufficient by
diligent labor in the mines to send home for his wife and two children.
He arrived in San Francisco a month before the time the ship was due,
for he was a western man, and had made the overland journey and knew
little of ships or seas or gales. He procured work in the city, but as