The dock into which we drew, and the streets about it, were
densely crowded with express wagons and hand-carts to take luggage,
coaches and cabs for passengers, and with men,- some looking out for
friends among our hundreds of passengers,- agents of the press, and a
greater multitude eager for newspapers and verbal intelligence from
the great Atlantic and European world. Through this crowd I made my
way, along the well-built and well-lighted streets, as alive as by
day, where boys in high-keyed voices were already crying the latest
New York papers; and between one and two o'clock in the morning
found myself comfortably abed in a commodious room, in the Oriental
Hotel, which stood, as well as I could learn, on the filled-up cove,
and not far from the spot where we used to beach our boats from the
Alert.
Sunday, August 14th. When I awoke in the morning, and looked from my
windows over the city of San Francisco, with its storehouses,
towers, and steeples; its court-houses, theatres, and hospitals; its
daily journals; its well-filled learned professions; its fortresses
and fight-houses; its wharves and harbor, with their thousand-ton
clipper ships, more in number than London or Liverpool sheltered
that day, itself one of the capitals of the American Republic, and the
sole emporium of a new world, the awakened Pacific; when I looked
across the bay to the eastward, and beheld a beautiful town on the
fertile, wooded shores of the Contra Costa, and steamers, large and
small, the ferryboats to the Contra Costa and capacious freighters and
passenger-carriers to all parts of the great bay and its
tributaries, with lines of their smoke in the horizon,- when I saw all
these things, and reflected on what I once was and saw here, and
what now surrounded me, I could scarcely keep my hold on reality at
all, or the genuineness of anything, and seemed to myself like one who
had moved in "worlds not realized.
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