rounded in a curve toward Black Point. Just before reaching the
Point there was a sandhill of no mean proportions; this, of course, we
climbed with pain, only to slide down with perspiration. It was our Alp,
and we ascended and descended it with a flood of emotion not unmixed
with sand.

Near by was a wreck,--a veritable wreck; for a ship had been driven
ashore in the fog and she was left to her fate--and our mercy. Probably
it would not have paid to float her again; for of ships there were more
than enough. Everything worth while was coming into the harbor, and
almost nothing going out of it. We looked upon that old hulk as our
private and personal property. At low tide we could board her dry-shod;
at high tide we could wade out to her. We knew her intimately from stem
to stern, her several decks, her cabins, lockers, holds; we had counted
all her ribs over and over again, and paced her quarter-deck, and gazed
up at her stumpy masts--she had been well-nigh dismantled,--and given
sailing orders to our fellows amidships in the very ecstasy of
circumnavigation. She has gone, gone to her grave in the sea that
lapped her timbers as they lay a-rotting under the rocks; and now
pestiferous factories make hideous the landscape we found so fair.

[Illustration: The Old Flume at Black Point, 1856]

As for Black Point, it was a wilderness of beauty in our eyes; a very
paradise of live-oak and scrub-oak, and of oak that had gone mad in the
whirlwinds and sandstorms that revelled there. Beyond Black Point we
climbed a trestle and mounted a flume that was our highway to the sea.
Through this flume the city was supplied with water. The flume was a
square trough, open at the top and several miles in length. It was cased
in a heavy frame; and along the timbers that crossed over it lay planks,
one after another, wherever the flume was uncovered. This narrow path,
intended for the convenience of the workmen who kept the flume in
repair, was our delight. We followed it in the full assurance that we
were running a great risk. Beneath us was the open trough, where the
water, two or three feet in depth, was rushing as in a mill-race. Had we
fallen, we must have been swept along with it, and perhaps to our doom.
Sometimes we were many feet in the air, crossing a cove where the sea
broke at high tide; sometimes we were in a cut among the rocks on a
jutting point; and sometimes the sand from the desert above us drifted
down and buried the flu