e fall of the house at the northwest corner of Harrison and
Second Streets must mark my fall. While I was biding my time, there came
to me a lean, lithe stranger. I knew him for a poet by his unshorn locks
and his luminous eyes, the pallor of his face and his exquisitely
sensitive hands. As he looked about my eyrie with aesthetic glance,
almost his first words were: "What a background for a novel!" He seemed
to relish it all--the impending crag that might topple any day or hour;
the modest side door that had become my front door because the rest of
the building was gone; the ivy-roofed, geranium-walled conservatory
wherein I slept like a Babe in the Wood, but in densest solitude and
with never a robin to cover me.

He liked the crumbling estate, and even as much of it as had gone down
into the depths forever. He liked the sagging and sighing cypresses,
with their roots in the air, that hung upon and clung upon the rugged
edge of the remainder. He liked the shaky stairway that led to it (when
it was not out of gear), and all that was irrelative and irrelevant;
what might have been irritating to another was to him singularly
appealing and engaging; for he was a poet and a romancer, and his name
was Robert Louis Stevenson. He used to come to that eyrie on Rincon Hill
to chat and to dream; he called it "the most San Francisco-ey part of
San Francisco," and so it was. It was the beginning and the end of the
first period of social development on the Pacific coast. There is a
picture of it, or of the South Park part of it, in Gertrude Atherton's
story, "The Californians." The little glimpse that Louis Stevenson had
of it in its decay gave him a few realistic pages for _The Wrecker_.

I have referred to the surprising interiors of the city in the Fifties.
What I meant was this: there was not an alley so miserable and so muddy
but somewhere in it there was pretty sure to be a cottage as demure in
outward appearance as modesty itself. Nothing could be more unassuming:
it had not even the air of genteel poverty. I think such an air was not
to be thought of in those days: gentility kept very much to itself. As
for poverty, it was a game that any one might play at any moment, and
most had played at it.

This cottage stood there--I think I will say _sat_ there, it looked so
perfectly resigned,--and no doubt commanded a rent quite out of
proportion to its size. It had its shaky veranda and its French windows,
and was lined with canv