And so we crossed the desert, over our shoetops in sand; climbing one hill after another, only to slide or glide or ride down the yielding slope on the farther side.  Meanwhile the fog came in like a wet blanket.  It swathed all the landscape in impalpable snow; it chilled us and it thrilled us, for there was danger of our going quite astray in it; but by and by we got into the edge of the town, and what a very ragged edge it was in the dim long ago!  Once in the edge of the town, we were masters of the situation:  you couldn’t lose us even in the dark.  And so ended the outing of our merry crew,—­merry though weary and worn; yet not so worn and weary but we could raise at parting a glad “Hoorah for Health, Happiness, and the Hills of Home!”

VIII.

THE MISSION DOLORES

I have read somewhere in the pages of a veracious author how, five or six years before my day, he had ridden through chaparral from Yerba Buena to the Mission Dolores with the howl of the wolf for accompaniment.  Yerba Buena is now San Francisco, and the mission is a part of the city; it is not even a suburb.

In 1855 there were two plank-roads leading from the city to the Mission Dolores; on each of these omnibuses ran every half hour.  The plank-road was a straight and narrow way, cut through acres of chaparral—­thickets of low evergreen oaks,—­and leading over forbidding wastes of sand.  To stretch a figure, it was as if the sea-of-sand had been divided in the midst, so that the children of Israel might have passed dry-shod, and the Egyptians pursuing them might have been swallowed up in the billows of sand that flowed over them at intervals.

Somewhere among those treacherous dunes—­of them it might indeed be said that “the mountains skipped like rams and the little hills like lambs,”—­somewhere thereabout was located the once famous but now fabulous Pipesville, the country-seat of my old friend, “Jeems Pipes of Pipesville.”  He was longer and better known to the world as Stephen C. Massett, composer of the words and music of that once most popular of songs, “When the Moon on the Lake is Beaming,” as well as many another charming ballad.

Stephen C. Massett, a most delightful companion and a famous diner-out, give a concert of vocal music interspersed with recitations and imitations, in the school-house that stood at the northwest corner of the plaza.  This was on Monday evening, June 22, 1849; and it was the first public entertainment, the first regular amusement, ever given in San Francisco.  The only piano in the country was engaged for the occasion; the tickets were three dollars each, and the proceeds yielded over five hundred dollars; although it cost sixteen dollars to have the piano used on the occasion moved from one side of the plaza, or Portsmouth Square, to the other.  On a copy of the programme which now lies before me I find this line:  “N.B.—­Front seats reserved for ladies!” History records that there were but four ladies present—­probably the only four in the town at the time.  Massett died in New York city a few months ago,—­a man who had friends in every country under the sun, and, I believe, no enemy.