"You called it Fort Gunnybags ?" he queried.
"Yes, it was so named from the precautionary bulwark of sand-filled sacks piled up in a hollow square in front to protect the entrance. A bronze plate marked the old building before the fire."
We turned into Columbus Avenue. "Your beloved Stevenson used to live at No. 8, there on the gore where the Italian Bank is," I said. "We are coming to the Latin Quarter, a section that has always been given over to foreigners, for in early days 'Sidneyville,' peopled by ticket-of-leave men from the penal colony of Australia, and 'Little Chile' of the Peruvians and Chileans, clustered close around the base of Telegraph Hill."
"The very place Stevenson would choose, where life was flavored with history and the mystery of the foreign. But where are you going?" he exclaimed, stopping short as I began to ascend the steps by which Kearny Street climbs the hill.
"I thought you wished to see the site of the Marine Signal Station." I looked down at him from the fourth stair with feigned surprise.
"I do, indeed, but--can't we go up by a funicular and come down this way?" he compromised. "My Boston calves protest."
"Oh well, we can go by the level a little farther, but I thought you liked the 'flavor of the foreign.' Anyway, we ought to see Earl Cummings' old man," I remembered.
"What is his fatherland and his business?" he asked as his eye traveled over the shop signs "Sanguinetti, Farmacia Italiana," "Molinari & Cariani, Grocers;" "Oliva & Brizzolara, Real Estate."
"His birthplace is the World Universal, and his profession-leading us back to nature," I answered. Then, as we passed the spick and span concrete façade of the Patronal Church of St. Francis, with its rear of burned brick: "This is the direct descendent of the old Mission," I told him, "the first Parish Church of San Francisco. It was gutted by the fire and is being very gradually restored. A notice within administers an implied rebuke: 'The First Erected--the Last Restored.'"
We paused at the iron fence of the small green triangle cut off from Washington Square by the slant of Columbus Avenue, and peered at the fine bronze figure of a sinewy old man stooping to drink from his hand on the edge of the little pool.