Then Commercial street between Leidesdorff and Battery was full of Cheap John auction stores, with all their clamor and attendant crowds at night. Then the old Railroad Restaurant was in its prime, and the St. Nicholas, on Sansome, was the crack hotel. Then, one saw sand-hills at the further end of Montgomery street. To go to Long Bridge was a weary, body-exhausting tramp. The Mission was reached by omnibus. Rows of old hulks were moored off Market street wharf, maritime relics of “’49.” That was “Rotten Row.” One by one they fell victims to Hare. Hare purchased them, set Chinamen to picking their bones, broke them up, put the shattered timbers in one pile, the iron bolts in another, the copper in another, the cordage in another, and so in a short all time that remained of these bluff-bowed, old-fashioned ships and brigs, that had so often doubled the stormy corner of Cape Horn or smoked their try-pots in the Arctic ocean was so many ghastly heaps of marine débris. I had seen the _Niantic_, now entombed just below Clay street, leave my native seaport, bound for the South Pacific to cruise for whale, years ere the bars and gulches of California were turned up by pick and shovel. The _Cadmus_, the vessel which brought Lafayette over in 1824, was another of our “blubber hunters,” and afterward made her last voyage with the rest to San Francisco. Manners and customs still retained much of the old “’49” flavor. Women were still scarce. Every river boat brought a shoal of miners in gray shirts from “up country.” “Steamer Day,” twice a month, was an event. A great crowd assembled on the wharf to witness the departure of those “going East” and a lively orange bombardment from wharf to boat and _vice versa_ was an inevitable feature of these occasions. The Plaza was a bare, barren, unfenced spot. They fired salutes there on Independence Day, and occasionally Chief Burke exhibited on its area gangs of sneak thieves, tied two and two by their wrists to a rope--like a string of onions. There was a long low garret in my Commercial street lodgings. It was filled with dust-covered sea-chests, trunks, valises, boxes, packages, and bundles, many of which had been there unclaimed for years and whose owners were quite forgotten. They were the belongings of lost and strayed Long Islanders, ex-whaling captains, mates and others. For the “Market” was the chief rendezvous. Every Long Islander coming from the “States” made first for the “Market.” Storage then was very expensive. It would soon “eat a trunk’s head off.” So on the score of old acquaintance all this baggage accumulated in the Market loft and the owners wandered off to the mines, to Oregon, to Arizona, to Nevada--to all parts of the great territory lying east, north and south, both in and out of California, and many never came back and some were never heard of more. This baggage had been accumulating for years.