San Francisco is ill placed, so far as mere building facilities are concerned. When the first houses were built in 1845 and 1846, they stood on a strip of beach surrounding the sheltered cove of Yerba Buena, and at the foot of the steep and lofty sand-hills. Dunes and cove have disappeared together; the hills have been shot bodily into the bay, and the former harbor is now the business quarter of the city. Not a street can be built without cutting down a hill, or filling up a glen. Never was a great town built under heavier difficulties; but trade requires it to be exactly where it is, and there it will remain and grow. Its former rivals, Vallejo and Benicia, are grass-grown villages, in spite of their having had the advantage of “a perfect situation.” While the spot on which the Golden City stands was still occupied by the struggling village of Yerba Buena, Francisca was a rising city, where corner lots were worth their ten or twenty thousand dollars. When the gold rush came, the village, shooting to the front, voted itself the name of its great bay, and Francisca had to change its title to Benicia, in order not to be thought a mere suburb of San Francisco. The mouth of the Columbia was once looked to as the future haven of Western America, and point of convergence of the railroad lines; but the “center of the universe” has not more completely removed from Independence to Fort Riley than Astoria has yielded to San Francisco the claim to be the port of the Pacific. The one great danger of this coast all its cities share in common. Three times within the present century, the spot on which San Francisco stands has been violently disturbed by subterranean forces. The earthquake of last year has left its mark upon Montgomery Street and the plaza, for it frightened the San Franciscans into putting up light wooden cornices to hotels and banks, instead of the massive stone projections that are common in the States; otherwise, though lesser shocks are daily matters, the San Franciscans have forgotten the “great scare.” A year is a long time in California. There is little of the earliest San Francisco left, though the city is only eighteen years old. Fires have done good work as well as harm, and it is worth a walk up to the plaza to see how prim and starched are the houses which now occupy a square three sides of which were, in 1850, given up to the public gaming-hells. One of the few remaining bits of old Golden City life is to be found in the neighborhood of the “What Cheer House,” the resting-place of diggers on their way from the interior to take ship for New York or Europe. Here there is no lack of coin, no want of oaths, no scarcity of drinks. “Juleps” are as plentiful as in Baltimore itself; Yerba Buena, the old name for San Francisco, means “mint.”