With these hills, with the strangeness of the architecture and with the
green-gray tinge over everything, the city fell always into vistas and
pictures, a setting for the romance which hung over everything, which
has always hung over life in San Francisco since the padres came and
gathered the Indians about Mission Dolores.
And it was a city of romance and a gateway to adventure. It opened out
on the mysterious Pacific, the untamed ocean; and through the Golden
Gate entered China, Japan, the South Sea Islands, Lower California, the
west coast of Central America, Australia. There was a sprinkling, too,
of Alaska and Siberia. From his windows on Russian Hill one saw always
something strange and suggestive creeping through the mists of the bay.
It would be a South Sea Island brig, bringing in copra, to take out
cottons and idols; a Chinese junk after sharks' livers; an old whaler,
which seemed to drip oil, home from a year of cruising in the Arctic.
Even the tramp windjammers were deep-chested craft, capable of rounding
the Horn or of circumnavigating the globe; and they came in streaked and
picturesque from their long voyaging.
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