It was, indeed, a wonderful day. Through her parted curtains she saw details of the splendor in the bits of turquoise sky between the houses, and the vivid greens of the rain-washed gardens. When the sun was well up, and the opened window let in delicious earth scents, she put on her hat and jacket and went out, turning her steps to that high spine of the city along the crest of which California Street runs. Has any place been found where there are finer days than those San Francisco can show in winter? “The breaks in the rain,” old Californians call them. It is the rain that gives them their glory, for the whole world has been washed clean and gleams like an agate beneath a wave. The skies reflect this clearness of tint. There are no clouds. The whole arch is a rich blue, fading at the horizon to a thin, pale transparency. The landscape is painted with a few washes of fresh primary colors, each one deep, but limpid, like the tints in the heart of a gem. And in this crystalline purity of atmosphere every line is cut with unfaltering distinctness. There is no faintness, no breath of haze, or forgotten film of fog. Nature seems even jealous of the smoke wreaths that rise from the city to blur the beauty of the mighty picture, and the gray spirals are hurriedly dispersed. Mariposa walked slowly, ascending by a zigzag course from street to street, idly looking at the houses and gardens as she passed. People of consideration had for some time been on the move from South Park to this side of town. The streets through which the young girl’s course led her were now the gathering place of the city’s successful citizens. On the heights above them, the new millionaires were raising palaces, which they were emulating on the ascending slopes. Great houses reared themselves on every sunny corner. The architecture of the bay-windowed mansion with the two lions sleeping on the front steps had supplanted that of the dignified, plastered-brick fronts, with the long lines of windows opening on wrought-iron balconies. These huge wooden edifices housed the wealth and fashion of the city. Mariposa paused and stood with knit brows, looking down from a vantage-point on the glittering curve of greenhouse and the velvet lawns of Jake Shackleton’s town house; there was no sign of life or occupation about it. Curtains of lace veiled its innumerable windows. Only in the angle of lawn and garden that abutted on the intersection of two streets, a man, in his shirt-sleeves, was cutting calla lilies from the hedge that topped the high stone wall which rose from the sidewalk.