San Francisco is perfectly wonderful.  Imagine colossal switchbacks going for miles, and other switchbacks crossing them like a chess board, and you have some idea of the way of the streets; hills as steep as staircases, and the roads straight up and down, not zigzag, just being obliged to take the land as it comes; some persons in the beginning, I suppose, having ruled the plan on flat paper without considering what the formation was like, and then insisting on its being ruthlessly carried out.

When we arrived at the station, Octavia and I were put into a two horse fly because it was very windy and cold.  It always is, we are told, and the motors for hire were all open.  So we started to go to Fairmount, the big hotel right up on the hill.  At first it was a sort of gradual slope past such sad desolation of levelled houses, with hardly the foundations left.  The results of the earthquake and the fire are so incredible that you would think I was recounting travellers’ tales if I described them, so I won’t.  Presently the coachman turned his two strong fat horses to the right, up one of the perpendicular roads, to get to our destination, but they would have none of it!  They backed and jibbed and got as cross as possible, and he was obliged to continue along the slope, explaining to us that there was another turning further on which they might be persuaded to face.  But when we got there it was just the same, no whipping or coaxing could get them to sample it.  They backed so violently that we nearly went over into the cellars of a ruin at the corner, and the man asked us to get out, as he said it was no use, none of his horses would face these streets.  And to go on to a gradual hill was miles further along, and he advised us to walk, as the hotel was only about six hundred yards away!!  So in the growing night Octavia and I, clutching our jewel cases, were left to our own devices.  We really felt deserted, as now that nearly everything in this neighbourhood is in ruins there are no people about much, and it felt like being alone in a graveyard, or Pompeii after dark.  We almost expected bandits and wolves or jackals.  We started, holding on our hats and feeling very ill-tempered, but we had not got a hundred yards on our climb, when a motor tore down upon us, and Gaston and the Senator jumped out; they had been getting quite anxious at our non-arrival and come to look for us.  Tom, of course, being an English husband, was sure nothing had happened; and when we got there we found him having a cocktail and smoking a cigar calmly in the hotel.

As we have come this way we have picked up Lola sooner.  I must call her that, Mamma, although I dislike using peoples’ Christian names, but Mrs. Vinerhorn is so long, and everyone calls her Lola, and the Senator wished it; he wants us to be friends.  He and I have been even more intimate since he told me his story.  I am deeply attached to him; he is a sort of father and yet not—­much nicer, really;