Now the fullness of that disaster--which was not more to you at the time than the brilliancy of newspaper dispatches--comes home to you for the first time. In the rear of your hotel is an open square of melancholy ruins, below it a corner plat still waste, others beyond in rapid succession. On the side streets, fragments of "party-walls," a bit of crumbling arch, a stout standing chimney remind you of the San Francisco that was and that can never be again. When you go out Market street, you may see where stood the pretentious City Hall--today a stretch of foundation-leveled ruins with a single surviving dome still devoted to the business of the Hall of Records. Still, to get the fullness of the disaster you must make your way into San Francisco's wonderful Golden Gate Park, past the single standing marble doorway of the old Towne house--a pathetic reminder of one of the great houses of the old San Francisco--and straight up to the crest of the high lifted Strawberry Hill. On that hill there stood until the eighteenth of April, 1906, a solid two-storied stone observatory. It seemed to be placed there for all time, but today it vaguely suggests the Coliseum of Rome--a half circle of its double row of arches still standing but the weird ruin bringing back the most tragic five minutes that an American city has ever spent. Or if you will go a little farther, an hour on a quick-moving suburban train will bring you to Palo Alto and the remains of Leland Stanford University, that remarkable institution whose museum formerly held whole cases of Mrs. Stanford's gowns and a _papier-mache_ reproduction of a breakfast once eaten by a member of her family. It must be discouraging to try to bring order out of the chaos that was wreaked there. The great library, which was wrecked within a month of its completion, and the gymnasium have never been rebuilt, although the dome of the latter is still held aloft on stout steel supports. The chapel, which was Mrs. Stanford's great pride and for which she made so many sacrifices still rears its crossing. Nave and transepts, to say nothing of the marvelous mosaics, were leveled in the twinkling of that April dawn. The long vistas of arched pergolas, the triumph of the master, Richardson, still remain. And the ruin done in that catastrophe to the high-sprung arch he placed over the main entrance to the quadrangle has been in part eradicated.