ery Streets and you have a picture of Yerba Buena Cove in
forty-nine. Heap up freight and baggage on the shore, erect thousands of
tents on the sand dunes around the edges of a town of shanties and
adobes climbing over the hills and you have our miner's metropolis," I
sketched for him.

"I see it," he said, shutting his eyes. "Now a wave of the magic wand
and the scene is changed." He opened them again.

"The magic wand is a steam-paddy, working day and night leveling off the
sand-hills and shoveling them into the bay. The wharves are converted
into streets and many good ships, whose crews having deserted for the
mines, being pulled up and used as storage ships, are caught by the
rising tide of sand and converted into foundations for buildings. Such
was the 'Niantic' at Clay and Sansome."

"Oh yes, the 'Niantic!"

"The third building on the site still retains the name."

"What was the case of assault that gave the belligerent name to Battery
Street?"

"It was a precaution against assault," I corrected. "Captain Montgomery
erected a fortification of five confiscated Spanish guns on the side of
this hill overlooking the harbor after he had taken possession of the
Mexican town. It was known as Fort Montgomery, or the Battery. It was on
the bluff just where Battery Street joins the Embarcadero down there,
for the hill came out to that point."

"Did the earthquake shake it down?" His question was tinged with
triumph.

I crushed him with a look. "The ships that came loaded with freight and
passengers took it away with them as ballast," I explained, "and of
recent years some contractors blasted it off and paved streets with it
until it was rescued from further demolition by some appreciative
landmark lovers of a women's club."

"What a fortunate interference! But the despoilers got a good slice of
it, didn't they? There wouldn't have been much of it left in a few
years."

"No more than there is of Rincon Hill, over there at the southern corner
of Yerba Buena Cove." I was considerably mollified by his appreciation.
"It was the best residence quarter of the fifties, but the 'unkindest
cut' of Second Street, which brought no good to anyone, not even its
commercial promoters, left it a place of the 'butt ends of streets,' as
Stevenson says, and inaccessible, square-edged, perpendicular lots whose
only value lies buried underneath them. I fear its scars can never be
remedied."

"You have several hills left," he conso