Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/155

 SAN FRANCISCO 125 Toward the west the park contains other lakes, and mounds sown with hairy paintbrush, blue and yellow lupin, sand verbena and fig mari- gold. The road past the buffalo paddock leads to the cliffs and the open Pacific, where the surf creeps seductively or breaks boisterously accord- ing to Neptune's mood, and makes sport for the myriads of black dots which, from a distance, seem to flock like penguins on the sands. The Cliff House is reached from the park by the boulevard, or from the city by half a dozen car lines. The hotel-resort which previously surveyed this notorious view withstood the quake, to burn a year later. The beach seems bare for want of its florid towers. A square of concrete now embodies the restaurant whose culinary soul has four times transmuted from one Cliff House to another. From an aesthetic point of view, this latest incar- nation cannot be commended as an advance upon the old. Madame Patti, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Dion Bouci- cault, Henry Ward Beecher, Robert Louis Steven- son and others of like celebrity, including five Presidents of the Republic, have dined or break- fasted in sight of the amphibean sun-worshippers whose eerie cries and poses draw multitudes hither. The clever brochure on San Francisco Trolley Trips, issued by the Chamber of Commerce, says " the Zalophus Calif ornianus is not the animal