“Oh yes, the ’Niantic!”

“The third building on the site still retains the name.”

“What was the case of assault that gave the belligerent name to Battery Street?”

“It was a precaution against assault,” I corrected.  “Captain Montgomery erected a fortification of five confiscated Spanish guns on the side of this hill overlooking the harbor after he had taken possession of the Mexican town.  It was known as Fort Montgomery, or the Battery.  It was on the bluff just where Battery Street joins the Embarcadero down there, for the hill came out to that point.”

“Did the earthquake shake it down?” His question was tinged with triumph.

I crushed him with a look.  “The ships that came loaded with freight and passengers took it away with them as ballast,” I explained, “and of recent years some contractors blasted it off and paved streets with it until it was rescued from further demolition by some appreciative landmark lovers of a women’s club.”

“What a fortunate interference!  But the despoilers got a good slice of it, didn’t they?  There wouldn’t have been much of it left in a few years.”

“No more than there is of Rincon Hill, over there at the southern corner of Yerba Buena Cove.”  I was considerably mollified by his appreciation.  “It was the best residence quarter of the fifties, but the ’unkindest cut’ of Second Street, which brought no good to anyone, not even its commercial promoters, left it a place of the ‘butt ends of streets,’ as Stevenson says, and inaccessible, square-edged, perpendicular lots whose only value lies buried underneath them.  I fear its scars can never be remedied.”

“You have several hills left,” he consoled me as his eye traveled along the broken western skyline.  “What is their role in this historic drama?”

“The ridge running down the peninsula is the San Miguel Range, crowned by Twin Peaks, with the Mission at its foot.  Nob Hill, next, acquired its name in the sixties, when the bonanza and railroad kings erected their residences there.  Before the fire”—­I felt my color rising, but there was no shade of change in my companion’s expression—­“the mansions of the ‘Big Four’ of the Central Pacific—­Huntington, Hopkins, Stanford and Crocker—­and the Comstock millionaires—­Flood, Fair and others—­filled with magnificent works of craftsmen and artists, had more than local fame.”

“From this distance, with three of the largest buildings in the city, the hill hardly seems to have fallen from its high estate,” he observed.

“You are quite right.  It still lives up to its name, for the Fairmont Hotel and the Stanford Apartments, christened for two of its former magnates, and the brown-stone Flood mansion, remodeled for the Pacific-Union Club, are no whit less nobby than their predecessors.”

“The next hill?” He turned his gaze to the houses perched on the top and clinging part way down its steep sides.