The San Francisco call., 1898-01-16

down from the upper deck far into the hold below. Down, down at the bottom of this wooden shaft three men are work ing shoveling the coal into the great iron baskets which swoop down empty from the tall iron cranes and go groaningly full aloft, to be turned upside down and sent flying down again into the bowels of the ship.
 Look at these three. They wear high boots. trousers and brown flannel smocks, with great arm-holes and deep-cut necks Their faces are so black and grimy you d hardly take them for white men. and the l great muscles of their bare arms and their powerful shoulders are becoming coated more and more thickly with the stihing black dust. They look like poor, intellectual pigmies la1oring down there to reduce that mighty black mountain of coal.
 What are they paid?" I asked the gen. ius of the water front.
 Twenty cents an hours" he replies. Ugh! It makes one think of Daudets Jack" And yet these men have air and light-such as it is.
 
 The two words heard oftenest on the water front the day I spent there were Klondike and Alameda.
 Every boat that wasn't bound for the | Klondike must have been sorrowful and 1 envious, so completely was it out of the i- swim. Here's one ship after the other being fitted up for northern trade. And the reason of these early large shipments of coal and lumber Is also told in the word Klondike; for the dealers in the north know that if they do not send down their cargoes before the spring rush to the great Alaskan gold mines begins, there will be no ships at their disposal. AS to the Alameda, everybody on the water front was inquiring about her. from Marshal Baldwin, waiting on Meiggs wharf for the Australian criminal who never came, to the crowd of relatives and l friends straining their eyes and their l tempers, while they waited.
 
 1 Further up around Telegraph Hiu way l the North Bend Is being repaired. Her captain thought he didn't need any one to bring him into port. and the North 1 Bend smashed upon Point Diablo, and
 The cruel rocks. they gored her sides.
 Like the horns of an angry bull.
 Look at the keel torn away, the great timbered sides ground and splintered and softened until the bruised patches on the poor ships hull look like pieces of rotten rope When you stand on the dry dock . and look up to this majestic vessel, you'll ] realize the power of wind and waves and l sunken rocks. Fancy great bulk like this hurled against Diablo and ground and ground upon the rocks. There's romance in the sea, but there's danger and death there, too.
 But the North Bend, cradled on the dry dock, with the merry tap of the ham, mers sounding against her sides, with the old calking pried out and the seams filled anew with oakum, has already for gotten Point Diablo. If the old ship dreams, as she lies there, 1t is of other trips, to the north and Klondike, again.
 
 Here's the Henry E. Hyde the largest American ship in the bay just now. And there's La Madeleine from Peru, the only French representative in this marine con gress. Down below the piers edge lies the poor little Katie S., a drudge of boats, humble. insignificant toiler she. laden with iron. She looks humIliated and abashed and ill-at-ease there among the great ones of the sea-going world.
 The Gerald C., whose red-sweatered mate is overseeing the loading of pressed bricks and sand to be used for mortar, Is bound up the coast. So is the scow Columbus out there on the bay, lying still and motionless, waiting for the tide to turn, laden with bricks which make a pretty dash of color against the pearly white water. the white cold skies and the long, slim black lines of the masts. Her crew is below eating lunch and the only living thing above is a great, gen. ial Newfoundland dog. who waves his great tail in amiable salutation as we go by on a little launch.
 We pass a host of saucy little tugs, and the great authority on this floating cos mopolitan city explains to me the signih- canoe of red stacks and black stacks and yellow stacks.
 There's the Othmarschen from Hamburg and further on the condemned Eureka shamefacedly nosing into the shore Here ; come the English ships; or rather they ap-