Here you can get a good meal with a bottle of wine thrown in for “two bits” (twenty-five cents), you can buy three different kinds of newspapers for the same price as one, as they have no coins smaller than a nickel.  For a nickel you can ride for miles to the Cliff House which is at the Golden Gate, where are acres of giant flowers of every conceivable variety, all beautiful, but odorless; you watch the sea lions nearly the size of oxen, and who roar and fight on the boulders.  Then we enter a bath-house, acres in extent, covered with glass, where you can swim in sea water warmed by steam-pipes, listen to the band, examine the multitude of wild animals and curiosities collected from all parts of the world.

[Illustration:  The Golden Gate of the Unpacified Pacific.]

Then we visit the city park of twelve hundred acres, once nothing but flying sand.  At first they planted on these dunes, grass roots from South America; these fastened themselves to the sand and formed a little soil; then were planted shrubs to stop the sand storms, then trees, and now the real estate is not all in the air.

This little nickel will take you to a mountaintop overlooking city and ocean, where you can sit under the Eucalyptus trees which shed their bark instead of their leaves, and enjoy the music and the not overmodest dramas, without extra charge.

The saloons, stores and theatres are open seven days and nights in the week, and multitudes of all nationalities, clad in their peculiar costumes, hobnob with each other in the most free and easy manner imaginable, without waiting for introductions, in this the most cosmopolitan city on earth.

Sometimes you will see the harbor literally covered with the most delicious fruits and vegetables, dumped into the water, because the transportation charges to market would more than eat up the proceeds of their sale.  I visited at San Jose, the large flourishing fruit orchard of a college classmate who had spent years of hard labor and the earnings of a lifetime, to bring his trees into bearing; but I found he had deserted his ranch because he could not make a living thereon, and had gone to preach for a little church far away, at five hundred dollars per annum.

I saw at Riverside large crops of oranges frozen upon the trees; but the real estate sharks never allow these facts to be published, because they fatten on the profits made by selling lands to the gullible “tender feet” from the east, who, when they have bought these farms at enormous prices, find to their utter discouragement, that they must also buy water for irrigation from monopolists, at ruinous rates, else the soil is worthless.  Here as nowhere else is illustrated the truth of the Scriptural adage:  “To him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”