there offer thanks for his safe journey.  When he came to St. Paul’s Chapel, with the statute of the Apostle in view, he went into it, and kneeling down he began to cross himself.  The sexton seeing his demonstrations said to him, ’This is not a Roman church, this is a Protestant church.’  But said he, ’It is a Catholic church.  Don’t you see the cross and the candles on the altar.’  ‘O no,’ said the sexton in reply, ‘It is a Protestant church.’  ‘No, no,’ said the Irishman, ’you can’t convince me that St. Paul turned Protestant when he came to America!’”

One is impressed with the air of prosperity and thrift on every hand.  Many of the houses are artistic in construction and elegant in their furnishings.  Some of them are stately mansions, notably the Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker residences on California avenue, in its most conspicuous section.  The homes of these California kings are adorned with costly works of art, choice paintings, and beautifully chiselled marbles.  During the sessions of the General Convention the Crocker mansions on the north side of the avenue were the centre of attraction in the liberal hospitality dispensed there and the courtesies shown to many of the Bishops and other Clergy.  On the evening of Wednesday, October the ninth, Bishop Nichols held a reception for the Bishops, other Clergy, the Lay Deputies, and their friends, in the Hopkins’ mansion, on the south side of California avenue.  This is now used as an Art Institute, and it is admirably adapted to its purpose.  The building was thronged all the evening by the members of the Convention and the representatives of San Francisco society.  Five thousand people high in the councils of the Church and the Nation and in social walks were in attendance; and it was impossible to accommodate all who came.  It is said that hundreds were turned away.  The writer and his friends considered themselves fortunate to be able to thread their way through the crowd without being crushed or having their garments torn.  It was the grandest function of a social character which ever took place on the Pacific coast.  The costly paintings adorning chambers, galleries and reception rooms, the splendid specimens of statuary, the numerous pictures, the brilliant lights, the strains of joyous music, but above all the moving throng of handsome women beautifully arrayed, and the noble bearing of Bishop, Priest and layman, with the fine intellectual faces seen on all sides, made this reception a scene never to be forgotten.  Who, in the days of forty-nine, would have dreamed that, a little over a half a century later, there would be such a magnificent gathering of intellect and beauty,—­men and women with lofty aims and noted for their achievements in letters and art, and their prominence in Church and State, and excelling in virtuous deeds, on a hill which was then a barren waste of shifting sands?