Meuniers. At the lower or west end of the room the wall had been removed and replaced by a single immense pane of plate glass. From this window, always curtainless, there was a startling view of the steep drop of the hill, beetling with houses and steeples, Telegraph Hill beyond and a little to the north; then the bay, and the towns on its opposite rim. At night the scene, with its blue above and black below, picked out with a thousand lights--massed into a diadem beyond the bay--looked like a sublimation of the painter's work. Within, the cunningly arranged lights saved the room at all times from being too sombre, and were set to reveal every detail of paintings far too precious to have been recklessly lavished upon a wooden house in the most recklessly built of all great cities. The dining-room--which had the proportions of a banqueting-hall, with an alcove for family use--was hung with tapestries and furnished with chairs lifted bodily from a castle in Spain; and it was a room in which no one would remember to look for ancestors. The library also commanded a view of the bay and had been decorated by native artists with imitations of the Giorgione frescoes, charmingly pink and smudgy. The hangings and furniture were of royal crimson brocade, and the walls were covered with books. Mr. Toole, who was a scholar of the old-fashioned sort, of which California still holds so many, had selected the books; and the contents were as noteworthy as the bindings. In a special alcove was a large number of priceless Fourteenth and Sixteenth Century editions. From this sumptuous room curved an iron balcony, where the old gentleman might be seen sunning himself any fine day, his steel spectacles half-way down his nose, and a volume propped on the shelf of an easy-chair furnished with all the modern improvements. On the white satin panels of the large round hall were a few of the most valuable old masters as yet brought to the country, but Mrs. Hofer, who was a patriot or nothing, did not hesitate to mix them with the best efforts of her fellow-citizens, nor to proclaim her preference for the native product. It was all very well to have old masters, and modern Europeans, if it was the thing, but she never felt quite at home with them, and liked her California inside as well as out.