NEW POSTOFFICE BUILDING.=

This costly and handsome structure was destroyed by fire.]

[Illustration: =JEFFERSON SQUARE.=

All of the buildings shown in the background were destroyed. Tents
were erected in this square to shelter the homeless.]

In a normal year the rains begin to fall heavily in November; there
will be three or four days of steady downpour and then a clear
and green week. December is also likely to be rainy; and in this month
people enjoy the sensation of gathering for Christmas the mistletoe
which grows profusely on the live oaks, while the poppies are
beginning to blossom at their feet. By the end of January the rains
come lighter. In the long spaces between rains there is a temperature
and a feeling in the air much like that of Indian summer in the East.
January is the month when the roses are at their brightest.

So much for the strange climate, which invites out of doors and which
has played its part in making the character of the people. The
externals of the city are--or were, for they are no more--just as
curious. One usually entered the city by way of San Francisco Bay.
Across its yellow flood, covered with the fleets from the strange seas
of the Pacific, San Francisco presented itself in a hill panorama.
Probably no other city of the world could be so viewed and inspected
at first sight. It rose above the passenger, as he reached dockage, in
a succession of hill terraces.

At one side was Telegraph Hill, the end of the peninsula, a height so
abrupt that it had a 200 foot sheer cliff on its seaward frontage.
Further along lay Nob Hill, crowned with the Mark Hopkins mansion,
which had the effect of a citadel, and in later years by the great,
white Fairmount. Further along was Russian Hill, the highest point.
Below was the business district, whose low site caused all the
trouble.

Except for the modern buildings, the fruit of the last ten years, the
town presented at first sight a disreputable appearance. Most of the
buildings were low and of wood. In the middle period of the '70s, when
a great part of San Francisco was building, there was some atrocious
architecture perpetrated. In that time, too, every one put bow windows
on his house, to catch all of the morning sunlight that was coming
through the fog, and those little houses, with bow windows and fancy
work all down their fronts, were characteristic of the middle class
residence district.

Then the Italians, who tumbled ov