How well I remember it all!  We were housed on Union Street, between Montgomery and Kearny Streets, and directly opposite the public school—­a pretentious building for that period, inasmuch as it was built of brick that was probably shipped around Cape Horn.  California houses, such as they were, used to come from very distant parts of the globe in the early Fifties; some of them were portable, and had been sent across the sea to be set up at the purchaser’s convenience.  They could be pitched like tents on the shortest possible notice, and the fact was evident in many cases.

Our house—­a double one of modest proportions—­was of brick, and I think the only one on our side of the street for a considerable distance.  There was a brick house over the way, on the corner of Montgomery Street, with a balcony in front of it and a grocery on the ground-floor.  That grocery was like a country store:  one could get anything there; and from the balcony above there was a wonderful view.  Indeed that was one of the jumping-off places; for a steep stairway led down the hill to the dock two hundred feet below.  As for our neighbors, they dwelt in frame houses, one or two stories in height; and his was the happier house that had a little strip of flowery-land in front of it, and a breathing space in the rear.

The school—­our first school in California—­backed into the hill across the street from us.  The girls and the boys had each an inclosed space for recreation.  It could not be called a playground, for there was no ground visible.  It was a platform of wood heavily timbered beneath and fenced in; from the front of it one might have cast one’s self to the street below, at the cost of a broken bone or two.  In those days more than one leg was fractured by an accidental fall from a soaring sidewalk.

Above and beyond the school-house Telegraph Hill rose a hundred feet or more.  Our street marked the snow-line, as it were; beyond it the Hill was not inhabited save by flocks of goats that browsed there all the year round, and the herds of boys that gave them chase, especially of a holiday.  The Hill was crowned by a shanty that had seen its best days.  It had been the lookout from the time when the Forty-Niners began to watch for fresh arrivals.  From the observatory on its roof—­a primitive affair—­all ships were sighted as they neared the Golden Gate, and the glad news was telegraphed by a system of signals to the citizens below.  Not a day, not an hour, but watchful eyes sought that signal in the hope of reading there the glad tidings that their ship had come.

The Hill sloped suddenly, from the signal station, on every side.  On the north and east it terminated abruptly in artificial cliffs of a dizzy height.  The rocks had been blasted from their bases to make room for a steadily increasing commerce, and the debris was shipped away as ballast in the vessels that were chartered to bring passengers and provision to the coast, and found nothing in the line of freight to carry from it.