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Women found excuses to call on each other, talking over what had happened, as they sat near their parlour windows, shaking their heads at each other, peering out between the lace curtains. The people on the cable-cars and the pedestrians looked again and again at the crêpe on the bell handle, and the curtained windows, craning their necks backward when they had passed.
Mamma and I take long rides on the cable-cars in the afternoon, and stay out at the Cliff House on the rocks every pleasant Saturday. Then we 've discovered nice sheltered nooks in the sand dunes beyond the park, and there we stay for hours, mamma reading while I study. We are so quiet and so happy; we were never alone together in our lives before.
It was twenty minutes past ten, a warm, sweet morning, with great hurrying back and forth at the ferry, women climbing to the open seats of the cable-cars, pinning on their violets or roses as they climbed. In the air was the pleasant mingling of the scents of roasting coffee, salt bay-water, and softening tar in the paving, that is native only to San Francisco.
To these people you would be only a hotel thief who forces his way into other men's rooms at night and " "You poor thing," interrupted Holcombe. "Do you know where you are?" he demanded. "You talk, Allen, as though we were within sound of the cable-cars on Broadway.
When I am tired I will go home. Shall we agree to meet there for luncheon?" Isabel nodded and started up Stockton Street alone, intending to take the first car that led in her sister's direction. Some of the trolley wires were down, but no doubt others were uninjured, and the cable-cars had always seemed to her as fixed as fate.
There was everywhere a great chittering of sparrows, and the cable-cars, as yet empty, trundled down the cross streets, the conductors cleaning the windows and metal work. From far down at one end of the avenue came the bells of the Catholic Cathedral ringing for early mass; and a respectable-looking second girl hurried past him carrying her prayer-book.
Below him the city swarmed tumultuous through its grooves, the cable-cars starting and stopping with a gay jangling of bells and a strident whirring of jostled glass windows. Drays and carts clattered over the cobbles, and an incessant shuffling of thousands of feet rose from the pavement.
But if you had been in battle for twelve days, as have the soldiers of Buller's column, passing shells would interest you no more than do passing cable-cars. After twelve days you would forget that shells are dangerous even as you forget when crossing Broadway that cable-cars can kill and mangle. Up on the highest hill, seated among the highest rocks, are General Buller and his staff.
At this date, 1866, San Francisco was no longer a mere resting-place for the birds of passage on their way to the mines, but had become a settled town, with an air of permanency and solidity. It was then compactly built, for it was only the advent years later of the cable-cars that enabled it to spread out over its many hills.
It was Sunday, the downtown streets were deserted except for the cable-cars and an occasional newsboy. The stores were closed and in their vestibules one saw the peddlers who were never there on week-days, venders of canes and peddlers of glue with heavy weights attached to mended china plates. Vandover had had no breakfast and was conscious of feeling desperately hungry.
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