Near by was a wreck,—­a veritable wreck; for a ship had been driven ashore in the fog and she was left to her fate—­and our mercy.  Probably it would not have paid to float her again; for of ships there were more than enough.  Everything worth while was coming into the harbor, and almost nothing going out of it.  We looked upon that old hulk as our private and personal property.  At low tide we could board her dry-shod; at high tide we could wade out to her.  We knew her intimately from stem to stern, her several decks, her cabins, lockers, holds; we had counted all her ribs over and over again, and paced her quarter-deck, and gazed up at her stumpy masts—­she had been well-nigh dismantled,—­and given sailing orders to our fellows amidships in the very ecstasy of circumnavigation.  She has gone, gone to her grave in the sea that lapped her timbers as they lay a-rotting under the rocks; and now pestiferous factories make hideous the landscape we found so fair.

[Illustration:  The Old Flume at Black Point, 1856]

As for Black Point, it was a wilderness of beauty in our eyes; a very paradise of live-oak and scrub-oak, and of oak that had gone mad in the whirlwinds and sandstorms that revelled there.  Beyond Black Point we climbed a trestle and mounted a flume that was our highway to the sea.  Through this flume the city was supplied with water.  The flume was a square trough, open at the top and several miles in length.  It was cased in a heavy frame; and along the timbers that crossed over it lay planks, one after another, wherever the flume was uncovered.  This narrow path, intended for the convenience of the workmen who kept the flume in repair, was our delight.  We followed it in the full assurance that we were running a great risk.  Beneath us was the open trough, where the water, two or three feet in depth, was rushing as in a mill-race.  Had we fallen, we must have been swept along with it, and perhaps to our doom.  Sometimes we were many feet in the air, crossing a cove where the sea broke at high tide; sometimes we were in a cut among the rocks on a jutting point; and sometimes the sand from the desert above us drifted down and buried the flume, now roofed over, quite out of sight.

So we came to Fort Point and the Golden Gate; and beyond the Fort there was more flume and such a stretch of sea and shore and sunshine as caused us to leap with gladness.  We could follow the beach for miles; it was like a pavement of varnished sand, cool to the foot and burnished to the eye.  And what sea-treasure lay strewn there!  Mollusks, not so delicate or so decorative as the shells we had brought with us from the Southern Seas, but still delightful.  Such starfish and cloudy, starch-like jelly-fish, and all the livelier creeping and crawling creatures that populate the shore!  Brown sea-kelp and sea-green sea-grass and the sea-anemone that are the floating gardens of the sea-gods and sea-goddesses; sea-birds, soft-bosomed as doves and crying with their ceaseless and sorrowful cry; and all they that are sea-borne along the sea-board,—­these were there in their glory.