carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a
general thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles. At ten o’clock
at night the Chinaman may be seen in all his glory. In every little
cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning
Josh-lights and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly,
guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow, long-tailed
vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short truckle-bed, smoking opium,
motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned inward from excess
of satisfaction–or rather the recent smoker looks thus, immediately
after having passed the pipe to his neighbor–for opium-smoking is a
comfortless operation, and requires constant attention. A lamp sits
on the bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker’s
mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on
fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a
hole with putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds
to smoke–and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of
the juices in the stem would well-nigh turn the stomach of a statue.
John likes it, though; it soothes him, he takes about two dozen
whiffs, and then rolls over to dream, Heaven only knows what, for we
could not imagine by looking at the soggy creature. Possibly in his
visions he travels far away from the gross world and his regular
washing, and feast on succulent rats and birds’-nests in Paradise.
Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No. 13 Wang
street. He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest
way. He had various kinds of colored and colorless wines and brandies,
with unpronouncable names, imported from China in little crockery jugs,
and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash-basins of
porcelain. He offered us a mess of birds’-nests; also, small, neat
sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen
to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse,
and therefore refrained. Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand articles
of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of, and
beyond our ability to describe.
His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the former were
split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from China in that
shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste which
kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage.
We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chow-chow street, making up a lottery
scheme–in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the same way in
various parts of the quarter, for about every third Chinaman runs a
lottery, and the balance of the tribe “buck” at it. “Tom,” who speaks
faultless English, and used to be chief and only cook to the Territorial
Enterprise, when the establishment kept bachelor’s hall two years ago,
said that “Sometime Chinaman buy ticket one dollar hap, ketch um two tree
hundred, sometime no ketch um anything; lottery like one man fight um
seventy–may-be he whip, may-be he get whip heself, welly good.”
However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances are,
as a general thing, that “he get whip heself.” We could not see that
these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that the
figures being Chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope to succeed
in telling “t’other from which;” the manner of drawing is similar to
ours.
Mr. See Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox street. He sold us fans of
white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that smelled like
Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms made of a stone
unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the
inner coat of a sea-shell. As tokens of his esteem, See Yup presented
the party with gaudy plumes made of gold tinsel and trimmed with
peacocks’ feathers.
We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial restaurants; our
comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their
want of feminine reserve; we received protecting Josh-lights from our