Commonwealth Network
You ride through Golden Gate Park, one of the most beautiful drives in the world, with its winding sweeps of magnificent distances, bowl up to the Cliff House and make for the balcony. Before you, blue and scintillant as frosty steel, is the Pacific, flaunting its white fringes and flounces along the shore at your feet, and dying away into the sky afar off. As the great waves come sliding up the slopes of gray sand and fling themselves down upon the land with thunder in the rustle of their garments, you think what a royal fool Canute was. Some flies with filmy wings are creeping along the curve of the horizon. They seem to move as the grass grows. They are ships from South America, from Oregon, from round the Horn. Some tobacco smokes are rolling up in the distance. They are ocean-going steamers from Honolulu and Cathay. Some fragments of white love-notes are flickering in the air. They are sea-birds.
Before you rises the acropolis of seals. There are other inhabitants of the rocky fastnesses, but you do not notice them at first. There the seals are, some of them coming up sleek and dark out of the sea; some lying about with lifted heads, quarreling, gossiping, playing with their young; some working their way up the crags like so many portly men tied up in tawny bags from head to heel. You are half sorry for their helplessness at first, but when you see them climbing where you could not scramble for your life, your sympathy is lost in admiration. Their voices are a hoarse confusion of the bark of puppies, the creak of dry cart-wheels, the clatter of guinea-hens. You vainly try to translate the jargon into English. It rises above the roar of the sea and drives against the wind. These seals have a perennial cold and live an everlasting Friday, for their food is fish. They do their own angling, and twelve thousand pounds is no extravagant estimate for the monthly rations of the whole community. The fishing fleets would be delighted to work up the last skin of them all into caps. Fish, likewise eggs: for you begin to see the birds dotting the rocks, sitting in drowsy rows, rising in freckled clouds, settling down to the sea like big snow-flakes in the dusk. There are gulls, pelicans, sea-parrots, sea-pigeons, guillemots; some swift, some slow, and all lazy. They lay their eggs heedlessly about among the rocks, and the seals help themselves. The eggs are clouded and colored marbles, pretty enough to pave the king's court-yard, and no two alike. They are nourishing inside and neat outside. Fish and eggs! What intellectual folk the seals should be, with nothing but edible phosphorus on the bill of fare!
The Seal Rocks are a sort of domestic Juan Fernandez, but nothing could be wilder. To see Crusoe's Capricornus come round a corner would not surprise you. The clamor of the waves, the crying of the disconsolate winds, the screaming of the birds, the strident talk of the seals, give you the cast-away feeling of a shipwrecked mariner.
With any other surroundings such a Babel would be hideous, but delicate ladies sit by the hour and listen as to bassos with subterranean voices and larks of primadonnas. California is proud of its seals and its seal. The Legislature tossed out a thousand-dollar bag of gold for the design, like the rich uncle in the play, when they could have bought a live bear and hired a live miner for half the money, while the bath-tub exclamation of Archimedes, " Eureka !" is everybody's, and Minerva the Romans had done with long ago. But it is wonderfully appropriate and peculiarly Californian. Contrast with this exultant device the arms of Washington Territory, with its cheerful young woman, her hand uplifted, an anchor at her feet, a cabin and a capitol in the distance, the rising sun opening a fan of glory over the picture, and the modest, hopeful word, borrowed not from classic Greek but savage Indian, "Al-ki!"--by and by.