So the stranger beholds San Francisco, the Improbable. Its pageantry is unrolled for all to see at first glance. Never was a city so prodigal of its friendship and its wealth. She salutes one on every crossing, welcoming the visitor openly and frankly with her western heart. In every little valley where the slack, rattling cables of her car-lines slap and splutter over the pulleys, some great area of the town exhibits a rising colony of blocks stretching up and over a shoulder of the hill to one side and to the other. Atop every crest one is confronted with farther districts lying not only beneath but opposite, across lower levels and hollows, flanking one’s point of vantage with rival summits. San Francisco is agile in displaying her charms. As you are whirled up and down on the cable-car, she moves stealthily about you, now lagging behind in steep declivities, now dodging to right or left in stretches of plain or uplifted hillsides, now hurrying ahead to surprise you with a terrifying ascent crowned with palaces. Now she is all water-front and sailors’ lodging-houses; in a trice she turns Chinatown, then shocks you with a Spanish, Italian or negro quarter. Past the next rise, you find her whimsical, fantastic with garish flats and apartment houses. She lurks in and about thousands of little wooden houses, and beyond, she drops a little park into your path, discloses a stretch of shimmering bay or unveils magnificently the green, gently-sloping expanse of the Presidio. No other city has so many points of view, none allures the stranger so with coquetry of originality and fantasy. Some cities have single dominant hills; but she is all hills, they are a vital part of herself. They march down into the town and one can not escape them, they stride north and west and must be climbed. The important lines of traffic accept these conditions and plunge boldly up and down upon their ways. And so, going or returning from his home, the city is always with the citizen—from Nob Hill he sees ships in the harbor and the lights of the Mission; from Kearney Street he keeps his view of Telegraph Hill and Twin Peaks—the San Franciscan is always in San Francisco, the city of extremes. Of all this topographical chaos, the most spectacular spot is Telegraph Hill. To the eastward on the harbor side, it rises a sheer precipice over a hundred feet high, where a concrete company has quarried stone for three decades despite protest, appeal, injunction and the force of arms. To the north and west the hill falls away into a jumble of streets, cliffed and hollowed like the billows of the sea, crusted with queer little houses of the Latin quarter.