type. There are strange hotels in this quarter, besides music- halls and lodging-houses, the haunts of vagabonds known to the police. I once accompanied an inspector of police on one of his periodical rounds through this region of darkness, and I should shrink from describing everything I saw there; but it proved to me that all that has been alleged of the immorality of this section of the native population is perfectly true. On the other hand, the more respectable part of the community had there many places of rational amusement, with which one could find no fault whatever. Among the largest music-halls, one may serve as a type of the great majority of the others. At the entrance there stood an altar, crowned with votive offer- ings dedicated to the god of pleasure, whose image surmounted the shrine. To the right and left of this hung scrolls, on which high moral precepts were inscribed, sadly at variance with the real character of the place. Half a dozen of the most fasci- nating of the female singers were seated outside the gate ; their robes were of richly embroidered silk, their faces were enam- elled, and their hair bedecked with perfumed flowers and dressed, in some cases, to represent a teapot, in others, a bird with spread wings on the top of the head. On the ground floor all the available space was taken up with rows of narrow compartments, each one furnished with an opium couch and all the appliances for the use of the drug. Here were girls in constant attendance, some ready to prepare and charge the bowl with opium, and others to strum upon the lute and sing sweet melodies to waft the sleeper off into dreamland, under the strangely fascinating influences which, ere long, will make him wholly their slave. On the first floor, reached by a flight of steps, there is a deserted music-room showing traces of the revel of the preceding night, in faded garlands which still
