cubes; for San Francisco is a pearl-gray city. At night you can look
straight down the side streets to Market street on a series of
illuminated restaurant signs which project over the sidewalk at right
angles to the buildings. It is as though a colossal golden stairway
tempted your foot.

Perhaps after all the most breath taking quality about San Francisco is
these unexpected glimpses that you are always getting of beautiful
hill-heights and beautiful valley-depths. Sunset skies like aerial
banners flare gold and crimson on the tops of those hills. City lights,
like nests of diamonds, glitter and glisten in the depths of those
valleys. Then the fogs! I have stood at my window at night and watched
the ragged armies of the air drift in from the bay and take possession
of the whole city. Such fogs. Not distilled from pea soup like the
London fogs; moist air-gauzes rather, pearl-touched and glimmering; so
thick sometimes that it is as though the world had veiled herself in
mourning, so thin often that the stars shine through with a delicate
muffled lustre. By day, even in the full golden sunshine of California,
the view from the hills shows a scene touched here and there with fog.

As for the hills themselves, steep as they are, street cars go up and
down them. What is more extraordinary, so do automobiles. The hill
streets are cobbled commonly; but often, for the better convenience of
vehicles, there is a central path of asphalt, smoothly finished. I have
seen those asphalt planes by day when a flood, first of rain and then of
sun, turned them to rivers of molten silver; I have seen them by night
when an automobile, standing at the hilltop and pouring its light over
them, turned them to rivers of molten gold.

Within walking distance of the ferry is the heart of the city. Here are