I continued the quotation.

“What are those terraced buildings?” he queried.

“It has been the military prison for years.  It is Alcatraz Island.”

He looked his inquiry.

“Spanish for Pelican,” I answered, seating myself on a rock.  “Ayala, the captain of the ‘San Carlos,’ the first ship to enter the bay, named it from the large number of the birds he found on it, and the big island to the right that looks like a portion of the main land is Angel Island, abbreviated from Ayala’s Isla de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles.”

“And Goat Island?” he questioned as he threw himself down on the grass.

“Yerba Buena,” I corrected.  “The other name was colloquially applied when Nathan Spear, being given some goats and kids by a Yankee skipper, put them over there.  There were several thousand on the island in forty-nine, but the Americans killed them all off by night in spite of Spear’s protests.”

“Not all of them,” he denied as he shied a stick at a white head reaching from below for a grassy clump.

   “‘And th’ goats and chicks and brickbats and sticks
   Is joombled all over the face of it,
   Av Telegraft Hill, Telegraft Hill,
   Crazy owld, daisy owld Telegraft Hill,’”

I laughed.

“I suppose the Spaniards must have had a name for this sightly hill,” said the Bostonian, his eye tracing the rugged skyline across the bay, along the Tamalpais Range on the north, and the San Antonio Hills on the east.

“Yes, Anza christened it in 1776 when he climbed up here for a view after selecting the sites for the Presidio and the Mission.  He called it La Loma Alta, and the High Hill it remained until the Americans put it to commercial use in forty-nine.  The little town on the edge of the cove in the hollow of the hills was unconscious of a ship entering the harbor until she rounded Clark’s Point, the southeast corner of this hill, and dropped anchor in full view—­”

“Any relation to Champ?” he interrupted.

“No, Clark was a Mormon, although he afterward denied it, who had built a wharf in the deep water along the precipitous bluff, where ships could always disembark even when the ebb-tide uncovered mud-flats elsewhere along the shore of the cove.

“The American miners and merchants, eager for the earliest news of the approaching mails and merchandise, erected a signal station on the top of Loma Alta, about where that flag-pole is.  When a vessel was seen entering the Golden Gate, the black arms of the semaphore on top of the building were raised in varying positions indicating to the watching town below, where every one knew the signals, whether it was a bark, a brig, a steamer or other kind of craft.  This was the first wireless station on the coast.

“There comes a side-wheeler,” I exclaimed, raising my arms upward in a slanting position, as a big liner from Yokohama entered the channel.  “Now fancy every office and bank closed, every law-court adjourned, every gaming table deserted; the shore black with people and long lines forming from the post-office windows to await the anchoring of the vessel, the landing of friends and freight, and the sorting of the mail by Postmaster Geary.”