In my walks through the city I found its climate agreeable rather for work than idleness. Sauntering or lounging is as little possible as it is in London. The summer is not yet ended; and in the summer at San Francisco it is cold after eleven in the day--strangely cold for the latitude of Athens. The fierce sun scorches up the valleys of the San Joaquin and the Sacramento in the early morning; and the heated air, rising from off the ground, leaves its place to be filled by the cold breeze from the Pacific. The Contra Costa Range is unbroken but by the single gap of the Golden Gate, and through this opening the cold winds rush in a never-ceasing gale, spreading fanlike as soon as they have passed the narrows. Hence it is that the Golden Gate is called “The Keyhole,” and the wind “The Keyhole Breeze.” Up country they make it raise the water for irrigation. In winter there is a calm, and then the city is as sunny as the rest of California. So purely local is the bitter gale that at Benicia, ten miles from San Francisco, the mean temperature is ten degrees higher for the year, and nearly twenty for the summer. I have stood on the shore at Benicia when the thermometer was at a hundred in the shade, and seen the clouds pouring in from the Pacific, and hiding San Francisco in a murky pall, while the temperature there was under seventy degrees. This fog retarded by a hundred years the discovery of San Francisco Bay. The entrance to the Golden Gate is narrow, and the mists hang there all day. Cabrillo, Drake, Viscaino, sailed past it without seeing that there was a bay, and the great land-locked sea was first beheld by white men when the missionaries came upon its arms and creeks, far away inland. The peculiarity of climate carries with it great advantages. It is never too hot, never too cold, to work--a fact which of itself secures a grand future for San Francisco. The effect upon national type is marked. At a San Franciscan ball you see English faces, not American. Even the lean Western men and hungry Yankees become plump and rosy in this temple of the winds. The high metallic ring of the New England voice is not found in San Francisco. As for old men, California must have been that fabled province of Cathay, the virtues of which were such that, whatever a man‘s age when he entered it, he never grew older by a day. To dogs and strangers there are drawbacks in the absence of winter: dogs are muzzled all the year round, and musquitoes are perennial upon the coast.