Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/134

 106 THE TOURIST'S CALIFORNIA ships," with their " brown-skinned, soft-spoken, sweet-eyed native sailors " of the South Pacific. He went out to the Cliff House, and climbed the shelving sands of Rincon Hill, there to meet Charles Warren Stoddard. During their quickly- born intimacy he " first fell under the spell of the islands," so he confides to us. The vivid scenes about Portsmouth Square appealed to his hu- morous, human sense. He describes it as a cen- tre of mixed crimes and nationalities, " Chinese and Mexican gambling hells, German secret socie- ties, sailors' boarding-houses and dives of every complexion of the disreputable and dangerous." Prowling about for material which his inimitable hand afterwards shaped into tales of horror or tales of pure charm, he became, in his own words, " a frequenter of shy neighbourhoods," a lounger among the turbaned Hindus, the Japanese and Kanakas, the Chinese, English and Portuguese sea-farers who sunned themselves on the plaza. On May 19, 1880, he and Mrs. Osbourne were married at the parsonage of the noted Presby- terian minister, Dr. William Scott, on Sutter Street near Union Square. Almost immediately they left San Francisco for the Napa Mountains and there became, with their son, Lloyd Osbourne, " the Silverado Squatters." Braced on either side by the railing around a bushy grass plot is the shaft surmounted by a