Perhaps the saddest sights in those early days were the neglected cemeteries.  There was one at North Beach, where before 1850 there were eight hundred and forty interments.  It was on the slope of Telegraph Hill.  The place was neglected; a street had been cut through it, and on the banks of this street we could, at intervals, see the ends of coffins protruding.  Some were broken and falling apart; some were still sound.  It was a gruesome sight.

There were a few Russian graves on Russian Hill, a forlorn spot in those days; but perhaps the forlornest of all was Yerba Buena cemetery, where previous to 1854 four thousand and five hundred bodies had been buried.  It was half-way between Happy Valley and the Mission Dolores.  The sand there was tossed in hillocks like the waves of a sandy sea.  There the chaparral grew thickest; and there the scrub-oaks shrugged their shoulders and turned their backs to the wind, and grew all lopsided, with leafage as dense as moss.

No fence enclosed this weird spot.  The sand sifted into it and through it and out on the other, side; it made graves and uncovered them; it had ever a new surprise for us.  We boys haunted it in ghoulish pairs, and whispered to each other as we found one more coffin coming to the surface, or searched in vain for the one we had seen the week before; it had been mercifully reburied by the winds.  There were rude headboards, painted in fading colors; and beneath them lay the dead of all nations, soon to be nameless.  By and by they were all carried hence; and those that were far away, watching and waiting for the loved and absent adventurers, watched and waited in vain.  A change come o’er the spirit of the place.  The site is now marked by the New City Hall—­in all probability the most costly architectural monstrosity on this continent.

“From grave to gay” is but a step; “from lively to severe,” another,—­I know not which of the two is longer.  It was literally from grave to gay when the old San Franciscans used to wade through the sandy margin of Yerba Buena cemetery in search of pleasure at Russ’ Garden on the mission road.  It flourished in the early Fifties—­this very German garden, the pride and property of Mr. Christian Russ.  It was a little bit of the Fatherland, transported as if by magic and set down among the hillocks toward the Mission Dolores.  Well I remember being taken there at intervals, to find little tables in artificial bowers, where sat whole families as sedate, or merry, and as much at ease as if they were in their own homes.  They would spend Sunday there, after Mass.  There was always something to be seen, to be listened to, to be done.  Meals were served at all hours, and beer at all minutes; and the program contained a long list of attractions,—­enough to keep one interested till ten or eleven o’clock at night.