I fear the poet was moved to sarcasm when he sang of "the willows so green, so charming and rurally true." Surely they were greener than any other trees we had in town; for we had almost none, save a few dark evergreens. Well, the place was charming in its way, and as rurally true as anything could be expected to be on that peninsula in its native wilderness. The Willows and Russ' Garden had their day, and it was a jolly day. They were good for the people--those rural resorts; they were rest for the weary, refreshment for the hungry and thirsty--and they have gone; even their very sites are now obliterated, and the new generation has perhaps never even heard of them. How we wondered at and gloried in the Oriental Hotel! It was the queen of Western hostelries, and stood at the corner of Battery and Bush Streets. And the Tehama House, so famous in its day! It was Lieutenant G.H. Derby, better known in letters as John Phoenix, and Squibob--names delightfully associated with the early history of California,--it was this Lieutenant Derby, one of the first and best of Western humorists, who added interest to the hotel by writing "A Legend of the Tehama House." It begins, chapter first: "It was evening at the Tehama. The apothecary, whose shop formed the southeastern corner of that edifice, had lighted his lamps, which, shining through those large glass bottles in the window, filled with red and blue liquors--once supposed by this author, when young and innocent, to be medicines of the most potent description,--lit up the faces of the passers-by with an unearthly glare, and exaggerated the general redness and blueness of their noses." The third and last chapter concludes with these words: "The Tehama House is still there." The laughter-making and laughter-loving Phoenix has long since gone to his reward. Of the Oriental Hotel scarcely a tradition remains. The Tehama House--what there is left of it--has been spirited to the north side of Broadway within a stone's-throw of the city and county jail. The cliffs of Telegraph Hill browbeat it. It is, one might say, the last of its race.