It is a glorious autumn morning, when the summer trade-winds have spent their force and ceased for the season, and the winter rains have not yet commenced: Sunday, and the whole population is abroad on the streets; churchward bend the few; in search of pleasure the many. Passing along Stockton Street, we hear the strains of the organ and the voices of the choir, in the Christian temple, mingling with the babel of many tongues on the street, and the rattle and roar of fireworks, and the shrill sounds of the gong, in the courtyard of the temple of Buddha or Foh, where "the heathen in his blindness," etc., almost under its very eaves, and beneath the shadow of the cross, and turn down towards the "Barbary Coast," where thieves, murderers, prostitutes, and vagabonds from every clime beneath the sun meet and mingle on a common level, and vice, and crime, and wretchedness, and moral and physical degradation unutterable are stamped on the face of every denizen of the evil neighborhood, marking him or her as an outcast, a leper, a pariah, among the children of men.
A narrow alley, inclosed by high brick buildings cut into innumerable small tenements, and swarming with Chinese men and women of the lower class, runs through the centre of a square or block, from one street to another. This alley is a study for the student of humanity. At its southern entrance a dozen or twenty persons, all Chinese, male and female, are gathered around a box upon which stands a neatly-clad Chinaman, who holds an open book in Chinese characters in his hand, and is ex-
