I well remember another home in San Francisco, one that possessed for me the strongest attraction.  It was bosomed in the sandhills south of Market Street,—­I know not between what streets, for they had all been blurred or quite obliterated by drifts of sifting sand.  It was a small house fenced about; but the fence was for the most part buried under sand, and looked as if it were a rampart erected for the defense of this isolated cot.  Some few hardy flowers had been planted there, but they were knee-deep in sand, and their petals were full of grit.  One usually blew into that house with a pinch of sand, but how good it was to be there!

Within those walls there was the unmistakable evidence of the feminine touch, the aesthetic influence that refines and beautifies everything.  It was not difficult to idealize in that atmosphere.  It was the home of a lady who chose to conceal her identity, though her pen-name was a household word from one end of the coast to the other.  She was a star contributor to the weekly columns of the Golden Era, a periodical we all subscribed for and were immensely proud of.  It was unique in its way.  Of late years I have found no literary journal to compare with it at its best.  It introduced Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Prentice Mulford, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, and many others, to their first circle of admirers.  In the large mail-box at its threshold—­a threshold I dared not cross for awe of it—­I dropped my earliest efforts in verse, and then ran for fear of being caught in the act.

Imagine the joy of a lad whose ambition was to write something worth printing, and whose wildest dream was to be named some day with those who had won their laurels in the field of letters,—­imagine his joy at being petted in the sanctum of one who was in his worshipful eyes the greatest lady in the land!  About her were the trophies of her triumph, though she was personally known to few.  Each post brought her tribute from the grateful hearts of her readers afar off in the mountain mining camps, and perhaps from beyond the Rockies; or, it may have been, from the unsuspecting admirer who lived just beyond the first sandhill.  This was another surprising interior.  There was plain living and high thinking in the midst of a wilderness that was, to say the least, uninviting; the windows rattled and the sand peppered them.  Without was the abomination of desolation; but within the desert blossomed as the rose.

There were other homes as homely as the one I preferred—­for there was sand enough to go round.  It went round and round, as God probably intended it should, until a city sat upon it and kept it quiet.  Some of these homes were perched upon solitary hilltops, and were lost to sight when the fog came in from the sea; and some were crowded into the thick of the town, with all sorts of queer people for neighbors.  You could, had you chosen to, look out of a back window into a hollow square full of cats and rats and tin cans; and upon the three sides of the quadrangle which you were facing, you might have seen, unblushingly revealed, all the mysteries and miseries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceanica; for they were all of them represented by delegates.