just going off on one. Imagine a climate rainless three-quarters of the
year, which permits the workingman to tramp all through his vacation
with the impedimenta only of a blanket, moneyless if he will, but with
the certainty always that the orchards and gardens will provide-him with
food.

Through the city runs one central hill-spine. From this crest, by day,
you look on one side across the bay with its three beautiful islands,
bare Yerba Buena, jeweled Alcatraz and softly-fluted Angel Island, all
seemingly adrift in the blue waters, to Marin county. The waters of the
bay are as smooth as satin, as blue as the sky, and they are slashed in
every direction with the silver wakes left by numberless ferryboats.
Those ferryboats, by the way, are extremely graceful; they look like
white peacocks dragging enormous white-feather tails. By night the bay
view from the central hill-spine shows the cities of Berkeley and
Oakland like enormous planes of crystal tilted against the distance, the
ferryboats illuminated but still peacock-shaped, floating on the black
waters like monster toys of Venetian glass. In the background, rising
from low hills, peaks the blue triangle of Mt. Diablo. In the foreground
reposes Tamalpais - a mountain shaped in the figure of a woman-lying
prone. The wooded slopes of Tamalpais form the nearest big playground
for San Franciscans - and Tamalpais is to the San Franciscan what
Fujiyama is to the Japanese. Would that I had space to tell here of the
time when their mountain caught fire and thousands - men, women and
children - turned out to save it! Everybody helped who could. Even the
bakers of San Francisco worked all night and without pay to make bread
for the fire-fighters.

By day, on the city side of the crest, you catch glimpses of other
hills, covered for the most part with buildings, like lustrous pearl