.

"Yerba Buena," I corrected. "The other name was colloquially applied
when Nathan Spear, being given some goats and kids by a Yankee skipper,
put them over there. There were several thousand on the island in
forty-nine, but the Americans killed them all off by night in spite of
Spear's protests."

"Not all of them," he denied as he shied a stick at a white head
reaching from below for a grassy clump.

"'And th' goats and chicks and brickbats and sticks
Is joombled all over the face of it,
Av Telegraft Hill, Telegraft Hill,
Crazy owld, daisy owld Telegraft Hill,'"

I laughed.

"I suppose the Spaniards must have had a name for this sightly hill,"
said the Bostonian, his eye tracing the rugged skyline across the bay,
along the Tamalpais Range on the north, and the San Antonio Hills on the
east.

"Yes, Anza christened it in 1776 when he climbed up here for a view
after selecting the sites for the Presidio and the Mission. He called it
La Loma Alta, and the High Hill it remained until the Americans put it
to commercial use in forty-nine. The little town on the edge of the cove
in the hollow of the hills was unconscious of a ship entering the harbor
until she rounded Clark's Point, the southeast corner of this hill, and
dropped anchor in full view--"

"Any relation to Champ?" he interrupted.

"No, Clark was a Mormon, although he afterward denied it, who had built
a wharf in the deep water along the precipitous bluff, where ships could
always disembark even when the ebb-tide uncovered mud-flats elsewhere
along the shore of the cove.

"The American miners and merchants, eager for the earliest news of the
approaching mails and merchandise, erected a signal station on the top
of Loma Alta, about where that flag-pole is. When a vessel was seen
entering the Golden Gate, the black arms of the semaphore on top of the
building were raised in varying positions indicating to the watching
town below, where every one knew the signals, whether it was a bark, a
brig, a steamer or other kind of craft. This was the first wireless
station on the coast.

"There comes a side-wheeler," I exclaimed, raising my arms upward in a
slanting position, as a big liner from Yokohama entered the channel.
"Now fancy every office and bank closed, every law-court adjourned,
every gaming table deserted; the shore black with people and long lines
forming from the post-office windows to await the anchoring of the
vessel, the landing o