to Commercial streets, was then considered a grand affair. Colonel Moore was the postmaster. There was an entrance at both ends, and a passage from street to street. The French, the women, and the editors each had a part assigned exclusively to them. The general delivery extended the whole length of the building, but the lines formed on the arrival of the steamers led into and far up and down the street. Probably never a post-office received letters in such a variety of languages. It was found necessary to employ a Chinaman, and clerks who understood Russian, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, besides which there were letters from Sweden, Norway, Poland, the continents of Asia and Africa, and the islands of the Pacific. The average number of letters then received by the San Francisco post-office on the arrival of each steamer, was sixty thousand, and the average number sent away by each steamer, fifty thousand—leaving twice a month ten thousand unanswered letters, ten thousand heart-aching expectants perpetually doomed to disappointment.
The following, evidently from the pen of Mr Ewer, I find in the Sunday Dispatch of the 17th of August, 1851. "Another vestige gone. The old land- marks in San Francisco are fast passing away. The fires which have so frequently swept over our city have obliterated many, and the march of improvement is covering the rest, so that in a short time nothing will remain to show how San Francisco stood when the tide of immigration first began to flow upon her shores. The Old Adobe, the City Hotel, the Bee Hive, are among the things that were, while the Niantic and the Apollo—evidences of the enterprise of a later date—have disappeared, and in their places stand large warehouses built on solid earth. One of the last land-marks is now about being removed—the boat-stairs, at what used to be the extremity of Long Wharf The steam paddy has deposited its sand all along the old wharf line, and the stairs are rapidly
