The most remarkable spot in all America is Mission Dolores, in the outskirts of San Francisco City--once a settlement of the Society of Jesus, and now partly blanket factory and partly church. Nowhere has the conflict between the Saxon and Latin races been so sharp and so decisive. For eighty or ninety years California was first Spanish, then Mexican, then a half independent Spanish-American republic. The progress of those ninety years was shown in the foundation of half a dozen Jesuit “missions,” which held each of them a thousand or two tame Indians as slaves, while a few military settlers and their friends divided the interior with the savage tribes. Gold, which had been discovered here by Drake, was never sought: the fathers, like the Mormon chiefs, discouraged mining; it interfered with their tame Indians. Here and there, in four cases, perhaps, in all, a presidio, or castle, had been built for the protection of the mission, and a puebla, or tiny free town, had been suffered to grow up, not without remonstrance from the fathers. Los Angeles had thus sprung from the mission of that name, the fishing village of Yerba Buena, from Mission Dolores on the bay of San Francisco, and San José, from Santa Clara. In 1846, Fremont the Pathfinder conquered the country with forty-two men, and now it has a settled population of nearly half a million; San Francisco is as large as Newcastle or Hull, as flourishing as Liverpool, and the Saxon blanket factory has replaced the Spanish mission. The story might have served as a warning to the French Emperor, when he sent ships and men to found a “Latin empire in America.” Between the presidio and the Mission Dolores lies Lone Mountain Cemetery, in that solitary calm and majesty of beauty which befits a home for the dead, the most lovely of all the cemeteries of America. Queen Emma, of the Sandwich Islands, who is here at present, said of it yesterday to a Californian merchant: “How comes it that you Americans, who live so fast, find time to bury your dead so beautifully?” Lone Mountain is not the only delicious spot that is given to the American dead. Laurel Hill, Mount Auburn, Greenwood, Cypress Grove, Hollywood, Oak Hill, are names not more full of poetry than are the places to which they belong; but Lone Mountain has over all an advantage in its giant fuchsias, and scarlet geraniums of the size and shape of trees; in the distant glimpses, too, of the still Pacific.