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I have read somewhere in the pages of a veracious author how, five or six years before my day, he had ridden through chaparral from Yerba Buena to the Mission Dolores with the howl of the wolf for accompaniment. Yerba Buena is now San Francisco, and the mission is a part of the city; it is not even a suburb.

A strange flag, curiously gay with stripes and stars, would fly above the customs house; strange men in uniforms of blue, and golden braid, would occupy the seats of power. Even the name of Yerba Buena would be altered, it was said. New Boston probably would be its title.

"I have not-a the pleasure of knowing-a the Miss Minnie, but the jewelry, when she arrives, to the throat-a of Miss Yerba, she has not lost the value the beauty the charm." "No," said Woods, cheerily. "The fact is, Baker, you were too slow. Miss Yerba's folks gobbled up the necklace while you were thinking. You were a new-comer. Old 'forty-niners' did not hesitate over a thing they wanted."

Government was but a name in Yerba Buena. A gringo engineer named Fremont with a rabble of adventurers had overthrown the valiant Vallejo at Sonora and declared a California Republic. He had spiked the cannon at the Presidio. And now a gringo sloop-of-war was in the bay, some said with orders to reduce the port.

Farther down was Finch's, better known as John the Tinker's bowling alley; Cooper's groggery, nicknamed "Jack the Sailor's," Vioget's house, later to be Yerba Buena's first hotel. The new warehouse of William Leidesdorff stood close to the waterline and, at the head of the plaza, the customs house built by Indians at the governor's order looked down on the shipping.

His office was in the old custom-horse standing at the northwest corner of the Plaza. He had hired two warehouses, the only ones there at the time, of one Liedsdorff, the principal man of Yerba Buena, who also owned the only public-house, or tavern, called the City Hotel, on Kearney Street, at the southeast corner of the Plaza. I stopped with Folsom at Mrs.

By some tacit understanding that had the charm of mutual confidence, they both exerted themselves to please the company rather than each other, and Paul, in the interchange of sallies with Dona Anna, had a certain pleasure in hearing Yerba converse in Spanish with Don Caesar.

"Am I to understand that you have heard nothing more from Miss Yerba, either for or against her story? That you still do not know whether she has deceived herself, has been deceived by others, or is deceiving us?" "After what I have just told you, Mr.

The little hand of Inez stole into her mother's reassuringly. "Is it that you fear for our Benito when he rides among the Gringos of the puebla?" Her dark crowned and exquisite head rose proudly and her eyes flashed as she watched her brother riding with the grace of splendid horsemanship toward the distant town of Yerba Buena. "He can take care of himself," she ended with, a toss of her head.

There was more than one bull-bear fight, and twice a week at least they carried their owners to the hills of the Mission ranch, or the rocky cliffs and gorges above Yerba Buena, the Indian servants following with great baskets of luncheon, perhaps roasting an ox whole in a trench. This the Californians called barbecue and the picnic merienda.