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house by winding down its bare sides, now Broadway and Pacific streets, and leaping the slough, now Jack- son street, wading through the bay, now Montgomery street, up a sand bank, now Washington street, to an open space, now Kearney street and the Plaza, thence fifty paces south to the point of destination. I can well remember, also, when an unobtrusive casa, com- pared with the immense structures which* now rise heavenward here and there at magnificent distances, was all that, in the way of internal, or for that mat- ter, external improvements, met the eye; when the Parker house, the old Portsmouth house, the United States hotel, Howard's store, the venerable adobe on the Plaza, then a custom-house, afterwards a broker's shop, and now no more, with one or two other shan- ties, looked to us immigrants of '49 like palaces; when seraped natives chased the wild bullock over the sur- rounding hills, satisfying a lean lank traffic, not com- merce, with the offering of a hide or horn; when a Chinepe was a lusus naturse, and a woman on the street — which was an imao;inarv line drawn in red and blue ink on paste-board — an absolute and unmitigated wonder."

The pile-driver, both the man and the machine, was an institution of San Francisco's babyhood. Without the driving of piles, the water-lots of the cove could not be reclaimed, and without their reclamation own- ership was of little avail. The manner of it was in this wise : from one end of a lumbering scow rose, high in the air, two perpendicular beams, between which played a large lump of iron. A primitive steam- engine, standing back of the upright beams, drove the machinery. On or near the spot destined to be re- claimed floated hundreds of piles, that is, young trees, from twelve to eighteen inches in diameter, cut thirty or forty feet in length, carefully trimmed and sharp- ened at one end. With its claws, which were attached to the end of a chain, the machine seized one of these floating logs near the large end, and with a