g the people of the East. It is doubtful whether, upon the whole,
the earnings of the San Francisco man equaled those of his Eastern
brother, but his holidays were frequent and his joys greater. The grind
of life was not yet steady--men had not become mere machines.

The climate of California is peculiar; it is hard to give an impression
of it. In the first place, all the forces of nature work on laws of
their own in that part of California. There is no thunder or lightning;
there is no snow, except a flurry once in five or six years; there are
perhaps half a dozen nights in the winter when the thermometer drops
low enough so that there is a little film of ice on exposed water in the
morning. Neither is there any hot weather. Yet most Easterners remaining
in San Francisco for a few days remember that they were always chilly.

A PECULIAR YET DELIGHTFUL CLIMATE.

For the Gate is a big funnel, drawing in the winds and the mists which
cool off the great, hot interior valley of San Joaquin and Sacramento.
So the west wind blows steadily ten months of the year and almost all
the mornings are foggy. This keeps the temperature steady at about 55
degrees--a little cool for comfort of an unacclimated person, especially
indoors. Californians, used to it, hardly ever think of making fires in
their houses except in the few exceptional days of the winter season,
and then they rely mainly upon fireplaces. This is like the custom of
the Venetians and the Florentines.

But give an Easterner six months of it, and he, too, learns to exist
without a chill in a steady temperature a little lower than that to
which he is accustomed at home. After that one goes about with perfect
indifference to the temperature. Summer and winter San Francisco women
wear light tailor-made clothes, and men wear the same fall-weight suits
all the year around.

Except for the modern buildings, the fruit of the last ten years, the
town presented at first sight to the newcomer a disreputable appearance.
Most of the buildings were low and of wood. In the middle period of the
70's, 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 districts.

Then the It