midday
I could not think of San Francisco without the trade winds ; I could not imagine its strange , incongruous , multigenerous procession marching to any other music . They were always there in my youthful recollections ; they were there in my more youthful dreams of the past as the mysterious vientes generales that blew the Philippine galleons home . For six months they blew from the northwest , for six months from the southwest , with unvarying persistency . They were there every morning , glittering in the equally persistent sunlight , to chase the San Franciscan from his slumber ; they were there at midday , to stir his pulses with their beat ; they were there again at night , to hurry him through the bleak and flaring gas-lit streets to bed . They left their mark on every windward street or fence or gable , on the outlying sand dunes ; they lashed the slow coasters home , and hurried them to sea again ; they whipped the bay into turbulence on their way to Contra Costa , whose level shoreland oaks they had trimmed to windward as cleanly and sharply as with a pruning-shears . Untiring themselves , they allowed no laggards ; they drove the San Franciscan from the wall against which he would have leaned , from the scant shade in which at noontide he might have rested . They turned his smallest fires into conflagrations , and kept him ever alert , watchful , and eager .