Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/156

 126 THE TOURIST'S CALIFORNIA that gives sealskin sacques. His coat is rough and hairy and looks better on him than on any one else." The sea lions are wards of the city. San Fran- ciscans, their visitors too, regard them with the sentiment which rises unbidden in the presence of a landmark. One ascends the incline to the grounds of the Sutro estate to loiter down by-ways among trees and sculptured fauns, and to linger on the parapet there to try, if he can, to assimilate the varied pan- orama of the sea and its islands, of hills crowding down to the shore, and of the ocean highway alive with merry-makers on foot or a-wheel. Below the terrace is the Giant Tub in which San Francisco, when deprived of bathing in the open by the chilliness of the water, takes its salt plunge. The Sutro Baths are well up on the scale of those " biggest " things which California does so well. Beneath its glass roofs the population of five towns of five thousand inhabitants each could find room : some to bathe, some to look on, some to stroll in the cheerful corridors, some to find dis- traction in the museum which exhibits the crafts of primitive peoples and cases full of stuffed beasts and birds. On the Point Lobos shore which rounds inward toward Lincoln Park and the Presidio, auras of foam rise about the wave-harassed steeps. The