are stranded in these parts.

Later, I began a vast but unsystematic exploration of the streets. I
asked for no names. It was enough that the pavements were full of white
men and women, the streets clanging with traffic, and that the restful
roar of a great city rang in my ears. The cable-cars glided to all
points of the compass. I took them one by one till I could go no
farther. San Francisco has been pitched down on the sand-bunkers of the
Bikaneer desert. About one-fourth of it is ground reclaimed from the
sea--any old-timer will tell you all about that. The remainder is
ragged, unthrifty sand-hills, pegged down by houses.

From an English point of view there has not been the least attempt at
grading those hills, and indeed you might as well try to grade the
hillocks of Sind. The cable-cars have for all practical purposes made
San Francisco a dead level. They take no count of rise or fall, but
slide equably on their appointed courses from one end to the other of a
six-mile street. They turn corners almost at right angles; cross other
lines, and, for aught I know, may run up the sides of houses. There is
no visible agency of their flight; but once in a while you shall pass a
five-storied building, humming with machinery that winds up an
everlasting wire-cable, and the initiated will tell you that here is the
mechanism. I gave up asking questions. If it pleases Providence to make
a car run up and down a slit in the ground for many miles, and if for
twopence-halfpenny I can ride in that car, why shall I seek the reasons
of the miracle? Rather let me look out of the windows till the shops
give place to thousands and thousands of little houses made of
wood--each house just big enough for a man and his family. Let me watch
the people in the cars, and try to find out in what manner they differ
from us, their ancestors. They delude themselves into the belief that
they talk English,--_the_ English,--and I have already been pitied for
speaking with "an English accent." The man who pitied me spoke, so far
as I was concerned, the language of thieves. And they all do. Where we
put the accent forward, they throw it back, and _vice versa_; where we
use the long _a_, they use the short; and words so simple as to be past
mistaking, they pronounce somewhere up in the dome of their heads. How
do these things happen? Oliver Wendell Holmes says that Yankee
schoolmarms, the cider, and the salt codfish of the Eastern States are
responsib