ad "Hoorah for
Health, Happiness, and the Hills of Home!"

VIII.

THE MISSION DOLORES

I have read somewhere in the pages of a veracious author how, five or
six years before my day, he had ridden through chaparral from Yerba
Buena to the Mission Dolores with the howl of the wolf for
accompaniment. Yerba Buena is now San Francisco, and the mission is a
part of the city; it is not even a suburb.

In 1855 there were two plank-roads leading from the city to the Mission
Dolores; on each of these omnibuses ran every half hour. The plank-road
was a straight and narrow way, cut through acres of chaparral--thickets
of low evergreen oaks,--and leading over forbidding wastes of sand. To
stretch a figure, it was as if the sea-of-sand had been divided in the
midst, so that the children of Israel might have passed dry-shod, and
the Egyptians pursuing them might have been swallowed up in the billows
of sand that flowed over them at intervals.

Somewhere among those treacherous dunes--of them it might indeed be said
that "the mountains skipped like rams and the little hills like
lambs,"--somewhere thereabout was located the once famous but now
fabulous Pipesville, the country-seat of my old friend, "Jeems Pipes of
Pipesville." He was longer and better known to the world as Stephen C.
Massett, composer of the words and music of that once most popular of
songs, "When the Moon on the Lake is Beaming," as well as many another
charming ballad.

Stephen C. Massett, a most delightful companion and a famous diner-out,
give a concert of vocal music interspersed with recitations and
imitations, in the school-house that stood at the northwest corner of
the plaza. This was on Monday evening, June 22, 1849; and it was the
first public entertainment, the first regular amusement, ever given in
San Francisco. The only piano in the country was engaged for the
occasion; the tickets were three dollars each, and the proceeds yielded
over five hundred dollars; although it cost sixteen dollars to have the
piano used on the occasion moved from one side of the plaza, or
Portsmouth Square, to the other. On a copy of the programme which now
lies before me I find this line: "N.B.--Front seats reserved for
ladies!" History records that there were but four ladies
present--probably the only four in the town at the time. Massett died in
New York city a few months ago,--a man who had friends in every country
under the sun, and, I believe, no enemy.