As firemen they are most prompt and efficient, performing their perilous duties with the greatest zeal and intrepidity--as might indeed be expected of men who undertake such a service for no hope of reward, but for their own love of the danger and excitement attending upon it, actuated, at the same time, by a chivalrous desire to save either life or property, in trying to accomplish which they gallantly risk, and frequently lose, their own lives. This feeling is kept alive by the readiness with which the public pay honor to any individual who conspicuously distinguishes himself--generally by presenting him with a gold or silver speaking-trumpet (that article being in the States as much the badge of office of a captain of a fire-company as with us of a captain of a man-of-war), while any fireman who is killed in discharge of his duties is buried with all pomp and ceremony by the whole fire-brigade. Two miles above San Francisco, on the shore of the bay, is the Mission Dolores, one of those which were established in different parts of the country by the Spaniards. It was a very small village of a few adobe houses and a church, adjoining which stood a large building, the abode of the priests. The land in the neighborhood is flat and fertile, and was being rapidly converted into market-gardens; but the village itself was as yet but little changed. It had a look of antiquity and completeness, as if it had been finished long ago, and as if nothing more was ever likely to be done with it. As is the case with all Spanish-American towns, the very style of the architecture communicated an oppressive feeling of stillness, and its gloomy solitude was only relieved by a few listless unoccupied-looking Mexicans and native Californians. The contrast to San Francisco was so great that on coming out here one could almost think that the noisy city he had left but half an hour before had existence only in his imagination; for San Francisco presented a picture of universal human nature boiling over, while here was nothing but human stagnation--a more violent extreme than would have been the wilderness as yet untrodden by man. Being but a slightly reduced counterpart of what San Francisco was a year or two before, it offered a good point of view from which to contemplate the miraculous growth of that city, still not only increasing in extent but improving in beauty and in excellence in all its parts, and progressing so rapidly that, almost from day to day, one could mark its steady advancement in everything which denotes the presence of a wealthy and prosperous community. The “Mission,” however, was not suffered to remain long in a state of torpor. A plank road was built to it from San Francisco. Numbers of villas sprang up around it,--and good hotels, a race-course, and other attractions soon made it the favorite resort for all who sought an hour’s relief from the excitement of the city.