lop; and the line would form in front of the
post-office and stretch like a black snake up Washington Street. Or we
watched the yellow omnibuses laboring down Washington Street like
clumsy beetles. It seemed to me that a city was the most delightful
and absorbing plaything a child could have, and it was a hard arbitrary
blow of fate that took me from it to the convent school at Santa Clara.

But if to leave the city was hard, it was terrible indeed to leave the
house, the familiar rooms, the familiar footsteps and voices that I
loved, and listened for. I had never been away from father and Abby in
my life, and though Hallie Ferguson and Estrella Mendez went also, I
was very homesick.

There was nothing at all interesting at the convent,--nothing but
pepper trees, and nun's black hoods, and books. Even when we walked
out there were only the dreary Santa Clara flats with the mountains so
distant on the horizon that their far-awayness made me want to cry.
The only nice thing about the convent was the vacation that took us
away from it, back, out of the burning summer valley to the bay, the
rows of gray-faced houses, the shipping and the wind. Each time I came
back it was with the rapture one must feel returning to some long left,
beloved place and finding it unchanged.

The palm, the cypress hedges, the sunny conservatory, the low, long
rooms beyond it, the dark hall, and narrow, precipitous stair were
always adorably the same. But around them the city was growing with
such speed that each time I returned I had to learn to know it afresh.
Already there were several blocks of houses beyond ours, and the second
year I came home from the convent Hallie Ferguson told me her father
was going to move because there was a gambling-house going up across
the street from them, "and build," Hallie expressed it, "in a more
fashionable neighborhood."

It was at the foot of Chestnut Street Hill their new house was
building, and that vacation we used often to walk over with
Abby--Estrella, Hallie and I--across the city and across the North
Beach district--to play in the building house. It was going up with
the same furious speed that was accomplishing the whole city. It
seemed that we had hardly stopped looking through the skeleton supports
at the bay before the plaster was drying on the solid walls; that we
had hardly ceased walking on the great naked flooring beams before the
smooth floor itself was palpitating under the fee