ire companies pass all belief. It begins
to seem to me now, as I write, that I must have dreamed it,--it was all
so much too fine for any ordinary use. But I know that I did not dream
it; that there was never anything truer or better or more efficient
anywhere under the sun than the San Francisco fire department in the
brave days of old. Representatives of almost every nation on earth could
testify to this, and did repeatedly testify to it in almost every
language known to the human tongue; for there never was a more cosmical
commonwealth than sprang out of chaos on that Pacific coast; and there
never was a city less given to following in the footsteps of its elder
and more experienced sisters. Nor was there ever a more spontaneous
outburst of happy-go-luckiness than that which made of young San
Francisco a very Babel and a bouncing baby Babylon.

[Illustration: Warner's at Meigg's Wharf]

VII.

A BOY'S OUTING

There was joy in the heart, luncheon in the knapsack, and a sparkle in
the eye of each of us as we set forth on our exploring expedition, all
of a sunny Saturday. Outside of California there never were such
Saturdays as those. We were perfectly sure for eight months in the year
that it wouldn't rain a drop; and as for the other four months--well,
perhaps it wouldn't. It is true that Longfellow had sung, even in those
days:

Unto each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Our days were not dark or dreary,--indeed, they could not possibly be in
the two-thirds-of-the-year-dry season. It did not rain so very much even
in the rainy season, when it had a perfect right to; therefore there was
joy in the heart and no umbrella anywhere about when we prepared to set
forth on our day of discovery.

We began our adventure at Meigg's Wharf. We didn't go out to the end of
it, because there was nothing but crabs there, being hauled up at
frequent intervals by industrious crabbers, whose nets fairly fringed
the wharf. They lay on their backs by scores and hundreds, and waved
numberless legs in the air--I mean the crabs, not the crabbers. We used
to go crabbing ourselves when we felt like it, with a net made of a bit
of mosquito-bar stretched over an iron hoop, and with a piece of meat
tied securely in the middle of it. When we hauled up those home-made
hoop-nets--most everything seems to have been home-made in those
days--we used to find one, two, perhaps three huge crabs revolvin