Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/154

 124 THE TOURIST'S CALIFORNIA terey, August 15, 1846), and the press from which San Francisco's first newspaper, The Star, was issued. Souvenirs of Napoleon and mediaeval ar- mour interest us less than the bell which rang the tidings of California's ratification as a State, Sep- tember 9, 1850, and the paintings executed by native sons and daughters. The new building of the Academy of Sciences, which contains a remarkable Natural History col- lection, is near the Memorial Museum. A little way from here one may hear on clear afternoons and evenings good music by an orchestra which sits enthroned in a Greek Temple. The Japanese pavilion affords tea among distorted trunks and pools a-gleam with darting gold and silver. Near the windmills which so ornately pump the park's water supply, Amundsen's stout ship Gjoa has run to its last haven, run aground in fact, but not ingloriously, for admiring hands rolled it here from the shore. The timbers which ploughed the ice of the Northwest Passage, do they complain to be thus trapped and riven from the sea? At various points of vantage among the trees or along the drives are statues memorial to Presi- dents McKinley, Garfield and Grant, to the au- thors Schiller, Goethe and Robert Burns, to Fran- cis Scott Key, and to the preachers Starr King and Junipero Serra, one reared in Unitarian New England, the other in a Majorcan convent.