worship performed in it, and in it the first capital trial by the Vigilance Committee held.  I am taken down to the wharves, by antiquaries of a ten or twelve years’ range, to identify the two points, now known as Clark’s and Rincon, which formed the little cove of Yerba Buena, where we used to beach our boats,—­ now filled up and built upon.  The island we called ``Wood Island,’’ where we spent the cold days and nights of December, in our launch, getting wood for our year’s supply, is clean shorn of trees; and the bare rocks of Alcatraz Island, an entire fortress.  I have looked at the city from the water, and at the water and islands from the city, but I can see nothing that recalls the times gone by, except the venerable Mission, the ruinous Presidio, the high hills in the rear of the town, and the great stretches of the bay in all directions.

To-day I took a California horse of the old style,—­ the run, the loping gait,—­ and visited the Presidio.  The walls stand as they did, with some changes made to accommodate a small garrison of United States troops.  It has a noble situation, and I saw from it a clipper ship of the very largest class, coming through the Gate, under her fore-and-aft sails.  Thence I rode to the Fort, now nearly finished, on the southern shore of the Gate, and made an inspection of it.  It is very expensive and of the latest style.  One of the engineers here is Custis Lee, who has just left West Point at the head of his class,—­ a son of Colonel Robert E. Lee, who distinguished himself in the Mexican War.[2]

Another morning I ride to the Mission Dolores.  It has a strangely solitary aspect, enhanced by its surroundings of the most uncongenial, rapidly growing modernisms; the hoar of ages surrounded by the brightest, slightest, and rapidest of modern growths.  Its old belfries still clanged with the discordant bells, and Mass was saying within, for it is used as a place of worship for the extreme south part of the city.

In one of my walks about the wharves, I found a pile of dry hides lying by the side of a vessel.  Here was something to feelingly persuade me what I had been, to recall a past scarce credible to myself.  I stood lost in reflection.  What were these hides—­ what were they not?—­ to us, to me, a boy, twenty-four years ago?  These were our constant labor, our chief object, our almost habitual thought.  They brought us out here, they kept us here, and it was only by getting them that we could escape from the coast and return to home and civilized life.  If it had not been that I might be seen, I should have seized one, slung it over my head, walked off with it, and thrown it by the old toss—­ I do not believe yet a lost art—­ to the ground.  How they called up to my mind the months of curing at San Diego, the year and more of beach and surf work, and the steeving of the ship for home!  I was in a dream of San Diego, San Pedro,—­ with its hill so steep for taking up goods, and its