Late that afternoon, we left the valley and began to thread our way among the Coast Range hills--green velvet hills, soft, round and voluptuous, like the "Paps of Kerry." We were still amongst them when the sun went down, and it was night when we arrived at the terminal in Oakland. CHAPTER XXXVII SAN FRANCISCO Leaving the train in Oakland, one is reminded of Hoboken or Jersey City in the days before the Hudson Tubes were built. There is the train shed, the throng headed for the ferry, the baggage trucks, and the ferryboat itself, like a New York ferryboat down to its very smell. Likewise the fresh salt wind that blows into your face as you stand at the front of the boat, in crossing San Francisco Bay, is like a spring or summer wind in New York Harbor. So, if you cross at night, you have only the lights to tell you that you are not indeed arriving in New York. The ferry is three miles wide. There are no skyscrapers, with lighted windows, looming overhead, as they loom over the Hudson. To the right the myriad lamps of Oakland, Berkeley and Alameda are distributed along the shore, electric trains dashing in front of them like comets; and straight ahead lies San Francisco--a fallen fragment of the Milky Way, draped over a succession of receding hills. Crossing the ferry I tried to remember things I had been told of this city of my dreams, and to imagine what it would be like. Of course I had been warned time and again not to refer to it as "'Frisco," and not to speak of the Earthquake, but only of the Fire. I had those two points well in mind, but there were others out of which I endeavored to construct an imaginary town. San Francisco was, as I pictured it in advance, a city of gaiety, gold money, twenty-five cent drinks, flowers, Chinamen, hospitality, night restaurants, mysterious private dining rooms, the Bohemian Club, openhearted men and unrivaled women--superb, majestic, handsomely upholstered, six-cylinder self-starting blondes, with all improvements, including high-tension double ignition, Prestolite lamps, and four speeds forward but no reverse. That is the way I pictured San Francisco, and that, with some slight reservations, is the way I found it. Several times in the course of these chapters, I have been conscious of an effort to say something agreeable about this city or that, but in the case of San Francisco, I find it necessary to restrain, rather than force my appreciation, lest I be charged with making noises like a Native Son. The Native Sons of the Golden West is a large and semi-secret organization of men born in California who, I was informed, are banded together to help one another and the State. Its activities are largely political and vocal. It was a Native Son who, when asked by an Englishman, visiting the United States for the first time, to name the Seven Wonders of America, replied: "Santa Barbara, Coronado, Del Monte, San Francisco, Yosemite, Lake Tahoe and Mount Shasta."