Part 15

Dark-eyed women lounged in the doorways of the houses that cling to the perpendicular sides of the hill. "The Italian pervades," I volunteered, "but there are Greek, Sicilians, Spaniards and French." The whole was reminiscent of the South of Europe, but the Neapolitan scene of cleated walks and steep steps lacked the enlivening color notes of the homeland.

"Not even a red shirt on a clothes line," I regretted, but a flood of soft voweled Italian from a woman in a third story window, musically answered by a man in the street below, brought consolation.

"The opera's own tongue," the Bostonian commented.

"Well, you leave it to me," finished the man in the street.

"Sure, Mike, I will," responded the woman.

My companion halted in consternation.

"We make American citizens of them all," I asserted.

"Les petits enfants aussi," I added as a child ran past, shouting a response in irreproachable English to the Parisian command of her mother.

We turned through the rude stone wall into Pioneer Park and along the unkept paths shaded by eucalyptus, cypress and acacia trees and came upon the open height where the mountain-hemmed bay lay in broad expanse before us, dotted with islands and with ferries streaking their way across its blue-gray surface.

"Wonderful," he exclaimed under his breath.

'"O, Telegraft Hill, she sits proud as a Queen, And th' docks lie below in th' glare,'"

I quoted from Wallace Irwin.

He lowered his gaze to the numerous wharves running out into the water, with teams appearing and disappearing at the entrances of the covered docks, like lines of busy ants.

"'And th' bay runs beyant her, all purple and green Wid th' gingerbread island out there,'"

I continued the quotation.

"What are those terraced buildings?" he queried.

"It has been the military prison for years. It is Alcatraz Island."

He looked his inquiry.

"Spanish for Pelican," I answered, seating myself on a rock. "Ayala, the captain of the 'San Carlos,' the first ship to enter the bay, named it from the large number of the birds he found on it, and the big island to the right that looks like a portion of the main land is Angel Island, abbreviated from Ayala's Isla de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles."

"And Goat Island?" he questioned as he threw himself down on the grass.

"Yerba Buena," I corrected. "The other name was colloquially applied when Nathan Spear, being given some goats and kids by a Yankee skipper, put them over there. There were several thousand on the island in forty-nine, but the Americans killed them all off by night in spite of Spear's protests."

"Not all of them," he denied as he shied a stick at a white head reaching from below for a grassy clump.

"'And th' goats and chicks and brickbats and sticks Is joombled all over the face of it, Av Telegraft Hill, Telegraft Hill, Crazy owld, daisy owld Telegraft Hill,'"

I laughed.

"I suppose the Spaniards must have had a name for this sightly hill," said the Bostonian, his eye tracing the rugged skyline across the bay, along the Tamalpais Range on the north, and the San Antonio Hills on the east.

"Yes, Anza christened it in 1776 when he climbed up here for a view after selecting the sites for the Presidio and the Mission. He called it La Loma Alta, and the High Hill it remained until the Americans put it to commercial use in forty-nine. The little town on the edge of the cove in the hollow of the hills was unconscious of a ship entering the harbor until she rounded Clark's Point, the southeast corner of this hill, and dropped anchor in full view--"

"Any relation to Champ?" he interrupted.

"No, Clark was a Mormon, although he afterward denied it, who had built a wharf in the deep water along the precipitous bluff, where ships could always disembark even when the ebb-tide uncovered mud-flats elsewhere along the shore of the cove.