Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/255

Rh then dipped, sloping down to the hollow of North Beach.

There was a sudden widening of the horizon on every side. Marine views broke on the eye through the spaces between high, cramped, flat buildings, over the tops of decrepit cottages, in the breaks between peeling, vine-draped walls. Vivid bits of sea were set in mosaic-like clearness between the trunks of dark old trees in gardens that were planted when the region was yet suburban. The end of the street's vista was filled with its blue expanse, with the distant hills beyond—all clear lights and shadows on this sun-steeped autumn morning.

Here was spaciousness and room. The torn hill, battered and weather-beaten with the stress and turmoil of the elements, stood up from the lower portions of the city in an eternal wash of air fresh from the ocean. Houses clung to it like barnacles. On its sharper steeps they seemed to be hanging precariously, clutching to irregularities in the soil, cowering down in hollows, or gripping rocky projections. But on its seaboard face the slope was more gradual, and here, in the old days, prosperous families had once built charming villas, where, from rose-shaded balconies, the inmates could look on the bay, sometimes a weltering waste, sometimes a vast sapphire level tracked with the trails of sailing-vessels bending to the trades.