places beyond
the safety of the lighted window-pane. Though I had lived among the
seven hills almost all my life; and though in ways it had grown
familiar, and even dear to me, yet I never seemed to grow quite used to
the city. It had strange tricks of deception that were enough to
unsettle the finest faith. For when I looked at it from the windows of
my room under the roof it was as flat as a plate, visible in its
entirety from end to end, and it was as easy to find Telegraph Hill or
the Plaza upon it as it was to pick up a block from the carpet. But,
when I went abroad in it, it hid away from me. It would never show me
more than one street at a time, and never by any chance would it reveal
to me, through the tall houses, in what part of it I was walking.

But by the time I was old enough to play in the garden by myself, and
make friends through the hedge with Hallie Ferguson, who lived a block
below us, I had come to accept this trick of the city as somewhat less
extraordinary. It was developing other characteristics not so fearful
to my mind and of far greater fascination; and I spent hours, when I
could not be out of doors, watching it from the windows of my room.
Father had built what was at the time one of the finest houses in San
Francisco. It had a glass conservatory at the side, and a garden with
a lawn and palm in the corner; and on rainy nights when the wind was
high, and the house was shaking, I could hear the long palm-fingers
tap-tapping on my window glass. The house stood half-way up Washington
Street Hill, on what was then the western skirts of the city, and from
my window under the roof I could look down over the whole city to the
east water front, with Rincon Hill misty on the south, and Telegraph
bold on the north of it. By leaning far out of the window, as Hallie
and I sometimes did when a ship was coming in, we could see northward
as far as North Beach, and Alcatraz Island; and from Abby's room across
the hall we could continue the panorama around to Russian Hill, whose
high crown cut off the Golden Gate. It was a favorite game of ours,
hanging out the window, with our heads in the palm leaves, to pretend
stories of what we saw going on in the city beneath.

All sorts of strange and interesting things went on in the city. We
could see the signals run up on Telegraph Hill when a ship was sighted.
And then the "express" would go dashing furiously down some street
below us, the pony at gal