With almost a hundred thousand inhabitants, drawn from all parts of the world, and with a "Chinatown" in its midst, the social character of Portland has, of course, changed since 1868. And yet Judge Deady's characterization given then would fairly hold good to-day. This means, of course, that Portland is eminently conservative, with the advantages and disadvantages of conservatism. In externals, Portland is an attractive city, with the trees in its streets and the lawns about its houses and its wonderful roses. Its early architecture is poor, but many of the recent buildings, municipal, ecclesiastical, commercial, domestic, and general, are not only large and imposing, but good. The city is beautifully situated, with the rivers at its feet and the wooded hills behind it, and in the distance the snow mountains, of which the finest and the favorite is Hood. Portland sits to-day mistress of the North Pacific, and with historic and prophetic reasons for expecting to be the metropolis of the whole Pacific coast. If the sceptre slips from her, it will be only because she lacks the faith, the courage, and the enterprise to enter into her inheritance. [Illustration] [Illustration] SAN FRANCISCO BY THE WEST GATE OF THE WORLD "City of gold and destiny" * * * * * "With high face held to the ultimate sea." BY EDWIN MARKHAM If Xenophon had journeyed westward from Athens, pressing beyond the amber caverns of the Baltic, beyond the tin mines of Thule, out past the Gates of Hercules, exactly west, across an ocean and a continent, the next _thalatta_ of his men would have saluted the Pacific at the Golden Gate from the low, shifting sand-hills of the unrisen San Francisco. For the violet-veiled city of Athene and the gray-draped city of St. Francis are in one line of latitude. San Francisco crowns the extremity of a long, rugged peninsula, a little north of the centre of California, "The land that has the tiger's length, The tawny tiger's length of arm," the land that stretches from pine to palm, "Haunch in the cloud-rack, paw in the purring sea." The one break in the mountain wall of the California Coast Range is the Golden Gate, the watery pass that leads from San Francisco to the Pacific. Spurs and peaks and cross ridges of this mountain chain would at long range seem to encompass the city round about; but, on nearer view, the edging waters on three sides make her distinctly a city of the sea.