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 light-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."
I could not complain that I had not a choice of places of worship.
The Roman Catholics have an archbishop, a cathedral, and five
or six smaller churches, French, German, Spanish, and English;
and the Episcopalians, a bishop, a cathedral, and three other
churches; the Methodists and Presbyterians have three or four
each, and there are Congregationalists, Baptists, a Unitarian,
and other societies.
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