Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/322

 302 longings seem all of a piece with our light-running machinery, with the spider lines of you American buggy waiting for its owner. We evade Nature by a deft trick, and do not obstinately oppose her. There the old walls were as solid yet as the everlasting hills; here we seemed to be living in flying-machines.

How strange, arriving from the other side of the world, to find people lining the dock dressed in the common way, and chattering the common speech, even to the latest bits of slang! A China steamer, however, had come in along-side just before us, and supplied a novel element of foreignness. Almond-eyed Celestials, in blue blouses, swarmed her decks and poured down her sides. Groups were loaded into express-wagons, and driven away up-town in charge of friends come down to meet them. Others trudged stoutly on foot, with their effects deposited in a pair of wicker baskets, at the ends of a long bamboo on their shoulders. This way of carrying burdens is constantly met with. The vegetable dealers hawk thus their wares from house to house, and present the aspect of the figures in cuts of the tea-fields. It is poor travelling when the curiosity alone and not the imagination is gratified, and San Francisco promises ample material for both.

Had we come in the gold days of '49 we should have landed some half-dozen blocks farther inland than to-day. By so much has the water-front since been extended and built into a solid commercial quarter. The 'Forty-niners found but a scanty strip of sand at the base of the steep hills.

Why, then, did they stop here, and build their city at such infinite pains and expense, instead of seeking a more convenient site elsewhere? There is, or was, some even more serious objection to all other locations. At Oak-