Here was spaciousness and room. The torn hill, battered and weather-beaten with the stress and turmoil of the elements, stood up from the lower portions of the city in an eternal wash of air fresh from the ocean. Houses clung to it like barnacles. On its sharper steeps they seemed to be hanging precariously, clutching to irregularities in the soil, cowering down in hollows, or gripping rocky projections. But on its seaboard face the slope was more gradual, and here, in the old days, prosperous families had once built charming villas, where, from rose-shaded balconies, the inmates could look on the bay, sometimes a weltering waste, sometimes a vast sapphire level tracked with the trails of sailing-vessels bending to the trades. Viola knew that North Beach, like her old home, was a quarter upon which fashion had turned its back. Rents were low there, and, judging by the number of signs of "Furnished Rooms," the inhabitants must be poor. She began her search at the foot of the hill, working up through the streets that struck her as at once clean and respectable-looking. But even her humble requirements were hard to fill. By noontime, passing back and forth from street to street, she had gained the top of the hill. She had seen nothing at once tolerable to her taste and suitable to her purse. Now, spent with fatigue and disappointment, she climbed a last breathless ascent, and came out upon the slope below the summit. This space of open ground, devoid of streets, and with here and there a hovel squalidly sprawling amid its own debris, slants up the crest of the incline upon which perches the deserted observatory, worn and weather-stained into an appearance of mellow antiquity. Even at this warm noonday hour the air was pure and balmily clear. Viola sank down, panting, on a broken sod, and several dogs, attracted by the unusual presence of a stranger, rushed upon her from one of the neighboring shanties, barking frenziedly. Some hens joined them, and for a moment they stood in an excited group, evidently meditating a sortie. Presently a tousled woman in a wrapper emerged from the house and threw an old boot at them, at which they scattered--the hens running off in staggering terror, the dogs scuttling away to safer regions, their tails tucked in. The silence that settled was crystalline. It seemed to place the city at a curiously remote distance. Far below her, Viola could see the wharves and the masts of ships that lay idle by the quays. Men were running about down there with the smooth, sure movements of mechanical toys. Drays passed along the water-front, and little light wagons that sped by in a sudden wake of dust. From there, and from regions unseen, sounds came up to her with clear distinctness. A bell rang, a dog barked, a child cried piercingly--each sound seeming to rise separate and finely accentuated from the muffled roar which broods over the hives of men.