San Francisco lay on a series of hills and the lowlands between. These
hills are really the end of the Coast Range of mountains, which stretch
southward between the interior valleys and the Pacific Ocean. Behind it
is the ocean; but the greater part of the town fronts on two sides on
San Francisco Bay, a body of water always tinged with gold from the
great washings of the mountain, usually overhung with a haze, and of
magnificent color changes. Across the bay to the north lies Mount
Tamalpais, about 3,000 feet high, and so close that ferries from the
waterfront take one in less than half an hour to the little towns of
Sausalito and Belvidere, at its foot.

Tamalpais is a wooded mountain, with ample slopes, and from it on the
north stretch away ridges of forest land, the outposts of the great
Northern woods of Sequoia sempervirens. This mountain and the
mountainous country to the south bring the real forest closer to San
Francisco than to any other American city. Within the last few years men
have killed deer on the slopes of Tamalpais and looked down to see the
cable cars crawling up the hills of San Francisco to the south. In the
suburbs coyotes still stole in and robbed hen roosts by night. The
people lived much out of doors. There is no time of the year, except a
short part of the rainy season, when the weather keeps one from the
fields. The slopes of Tamalpais are crowded with little villas dotted
through the woods, and these minor estates run far up into the redwood
country. The deep coves of Belvidere, sheltered by the wind from
Tamalpais, held a colony of "arks" or houseboats, where people lived in
the rather disagreeable summer months, coming over to business every day
by ferry. Everything there invites out of doors.

The climate of California is peculiar; it is hard to give an impression
of it. In the region about San Francisco, all the forces of nature work