was one of the jumping-off places; for a steep stairway led
down the hill to the dock two hundred feet below. As for our neighbors,
they dwelt in frame houses, one or two stories in height; and his was
the happier house that had a little strip of flowery-land in front of
it, and a breathing space in the rear.

The school--our first school in California--backed into the hill across
the street from us. The girls and the boys had each an inclosed space
for recreation. It could not be called a playground, for there was no
ground visible. It was a platform of wood heavily timbered beneath and
fenced in; from the front of it one might have cast one's self to the
street below, at the cost of a broken bone or two. In those days more
than one leg was fractured by an accidental fall from a soaring
sidewalk.

Above and beyond the school-house Telegraph Hill rose a hundred feet or
more. Our street marked the snow-line, as it were; beyond it the Hill
was not inhabited save by flocks of goats that browsed there all the
year round, and the herds of boys that gave them chase, especially of a
holiday. The Hill was crowned by a shanty that had seen its best days.
It had been the lookout from the time when the Forty-Niners began to
watch for fresh arrivals. From the observatory on its roof--a primitive
affair--all ships were sighted as they neared the Golden Gate, and the
glad news was telegraphed by a system of signals to the citizens below.
Not a day, not an hour, but watchful eyes sought that signal in the hope
of reading there the glad tidings that their ship had come.

The Hill sloped suddenly, from the signal station, on every side. On the
north and east it terminated abruptly in artificial cliffs of a dizzy
height. The rocks had been blasted from their bases to make room for a
steadily increasing commerce, and the debris was shipped away as ballast
in the vessels that were chartered to bring passengers and provision to
the coast, and found nothing in the line of freight to carry from it.

Upon those northern and eastern slopes of the Hill a few venturesome
cottagers had built their nests. The cottages were indeed nestlike: they
were so small, so compact, so cosy, so overrun with vines and flowering
foliage. Usually of one story, or of a story and a half at most, they
clung to the hillside facing the water, and looking out upon its noble
expanse from tiny balconies as delicate and dainty as toys. Their
garden-plots were set on e