San Francisco is not the back door of the continent.  San Francisco is the front door.  Every ship sailing out of its magnificent bay to the Orient, proclaims this fact.  San Francisco will one day lead the continent.  A city that cares for its poor and helpless, its children and dumb animals, that encourages art and learning, and never wearies in its prosecution of evil-doers—­that city will eventually emerge triumphant from every cloud of evil report.  Long live the dear city by the Golden Gate!

MARSHALL SAUNDERS, July, 1909.

“Senor Barrow, I congratulate you,” Morale said, in his native tongue.  “A woman who cannot be won away by passion or by chance, is a woman of gold.”

GERTRUDE B. MILLARD,
in On the Ciudad Road, The Newsletter, Jan., 1899.

AT THE PRESIDIO OF SAN FRANCISCO.

  The rose and honey-suckle here entwine
  In lovely comradeship their am’rous arms;
  Here grasses spread their undecaying charms. 
  And every wall is eloquent with vine;
  Far-reaching avenues make beckoning sign,
  And as we stroll along their tree-lined way,
  The songster trills his rapture-breathing lay
  From where he finds inviolable shrine. 
  And yet, within this beauty-haunted place
  War keeps his dreadful engines at command. 
  With scarce a smile upon his frowning face,
  And ever ready, unrelaxing hand ... 
  We start to see, when dreaming in these bowers,
  A tiger sleeping on a bed of flowers.

EDWARD ROBESON TAYLOR,
in Moods and Other Verse.

MARCH 1.

THE CITY’S VOICE.

  A mighty undertone of mingled sound;
    The cadent tumult rising from a throng
  Of urban workers, blending in a song
    Of greater life that makes the pulses bound. 
  The whirr of turning wheels, the hammers’ ring
    The noise of traffic and the tread of men,
  The viol’s sigh, the scratching of a pen—­
    All to a vibrant Whole their echoes fling. 
  Hark to the City’s voice; it tells a tale
    Of triumphs and defeats, of joy and woe,
  The lover’s tryst, the challenge of a foe,
    A dying gasp, a new-born infant’s wail. 
  The pulse-beats of a million hearts combined,
    Reverberating in a rhythmic thrill—­
  A vital message that is never still—­
    A sweeping, cosmic chorus, unconfined.

LOUIS J. STELLMANN,
in San Francisco Town Talk, December 6, 1902.

MARCH 2.

From his windows on Russian Hill one saw always something strange and suggestive creeping through the mists of the bay.  It would be a South Sea Island brig, bringing in copra, to take out cottons and idols; a Chinese junk after sharks’ livers; an old whaler, which seemed to drip oil, home from a year of cruising in the Arctic.  Even the tramp windjammers were deep-chested craft, capable of rounding the Horn or of circumnavigating the globe; and they came in streaked and picturesque from their long voyaging.