Near the station a bit of fence painted with a cigar advertisement
reeled over into the mud, while under its lee lay an abandoned gravel
wagon with dished wheels. The station was connected with the town by
the extension of B Street, which struck across the flats geometrically
straight, a file of tall poles with intervening wires marching along
with it. At the station these were headed by an iron electric-light pole
that, with its supports and outriggers, looked for all the world like an
immense grasshopper on its hind legs.
Across the flats, at the fringe of the town, were the dump heaps, the
figures of a few Chinese rag-pickers moving over them. Far to the left
the view was shut off by the immense red-brown drum of the gas-works;
to the right it was bounded by the chimneys and workshops of an iron
foundry.
Across the railroad tracks, to seaward, one saw the long stretch of
black mud bank left bare by the tide, which was far out, nearly half a
mile. Clouds of sea-gulls were forever rising and settling upon this mud
bank; a wrecked and abandoned wharf crawled over it on tottering legs;
close in an old sailboat lay canted on her bilge.
But farther on, across the yellow waters of the bay, beyond Goat Island,
lay San Francisco, a blue line of hills, rugged with roofs and spires.
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