While I am speaking of the reception in the Hopkins’ Art Institute, I may note that Californians have a great love for art.  Their own grand scenery of mountain and valley and ocean fosters the love for the beautiful; and to-day they can point with pride to the works of such men as Julian Rix, Charles Dickman, H.J.  Bloomer, J.M.  Gamble, and H. Breuer, whose landscapes are eagerly sought for, and command high prices.  The frequent sales of paintings are the best evidence that the people of San Francisco equal the citizens of the oldest cities of the land in refinement and the elevation of the mind and heart above the mere desire to make money.  There is also a goodly array of female artists who deserve praise and honour.  Eastern cities must look well to their laurels in the matter of art as well as in many other things.  The contrast between 1849 and 1901 in the prices paid for articles of consumption and service rendered is quite remarkable.  When Bayard Taylor visited San Francisco in 1849 he paid the sum of two dollars to a Mexican porter to carry his trunk from the ship to the Plaza or Portsmouth Square.  Here in an adobe building, he tells us, he had his lodging.  His bed, in a loft, and his three meals per day, consisting of beefsteak, bread and coffee, cost him thirty-five dollars a week.  From other sources we learn that, if you kept house, you had to pay fifty cents per pound for potatoes,—­one might weigh a pound.  Apples were sold at fifty cents a piece, dried apples at seventy-five cents a pound.  Fresh beef cost fifty cents a pound, milk was a dollar a quart, hens brought six dollars a piece, eggs nine dollars a dozen, and butter brought down from Oregon, was sold at the rate of two dollars and fifty cents per pound.  Flour was in demand at fifty dollars a barrel, and a basket of greens would readily bring eight dollars.  A cow cost two hundred dollars.  A tin coffee pot was worth five dollars, and a small cooking stove was valued at one hundred dollars.  A cook commanded three hundred dollars a month, a clerk two hundred dollars a month, and a carpenter received twelve dollars a day.  Lumber sold for four hundred dollars per thousand feet, and for a small dwelling house you had to pay a rental of five hundred dollars per month.  It must be remembered that people were pouring into San Francisco from all parts of the world in search of gold, that there were few if any persons to till the ground, and that many of the articles in demand for life’s necessities were brought either across the Isthmus of Panama or around by Cape Horn.  In consequence the cost of living was necessarily high.  To-day you can live as cheaply in San Francisco or any other city of California, as Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, or San Diego, as in any eastern city or town.  Rooms with board can be secured at the Palace Hotel, corner of Market street and New Montgomery, at the rate of three dollars and a half per day up to five dollars.  Without board you can obtain a room