In our perambulations about Chinatown, we must next visit an opium-joint. This mysterious place was situated in a long, rambling building through which we had to move cautiously so as not to stumble into some pit or dangerous hole or trap-door. Here were no electric lights to drive away the gloom, here no gas-jets to show us where we were treading, nothing but an occasional lamp dimly burning. Yet we went on as if drawn by a magic spell. At last we were ushered into a room poorly furnished. It was not more than twelve feet square, and in the corner was an apology for a bed. On this was stretched an old man whose face was sunken, whose eyes were lusterless, whose hand was long and thin and bony, and whose voice was attenuated and pitched in a falsetto key. The guide said that this old Chinaman was sixty-eight years of age, and that he had had a life of varied experience. He was a miner by profession, but had spent all his earnings long ago, and was now an object of charity as well as of pity. Indeed he was the very embodiment of misery, a wretched, woebegone, human being! He had lost one arm in an accident during his mining days. Chinamen in the thirst for gold had mining claims as well as Anglo-Saxons. This desire for the precious metal seems to be universal. All men more or less love gold; and for its acquisition they will undergo great hardship, face peril, risk their lives. This aged Chinaman for whom there was no future except to join his ancestors in another life, was now a pauper notwithstanding all his quest for the treasures of the mines; and his chief solace, if it be comfort indeed to have the senses benumbed periodically, or daily, and then wake up to the consciousness of loss and with a feeling of despair betimes, was in his opium pipe, which he smoked fifty times a day at the cost of half a dollar, the offering of charity, the dole received from his pitying countrymen or the interested traveller who might come to his forlorn abode. But what a fascination the opium drug has for the Chinaman, and not for him alone, but for children of other races--for men and women who, when under its spell, will sell honour and sacrifice all that is dear in life, and even forego the prospect and the blessed hope of entering at last into the bliss of the heavenly world! But what is opium, what its parentage and history? The Greeks will tell you it is their opion or opos, the juice of the poppy, and the botanist will point out the magic flower for you as the Papaver Somniferum, whose home was originally in the north of Europe and in Western Asia; but now, just as the tribes of the earth have spread out into many lands, so has the poppy which has brought much misery as well as blessing to men, found its way into various quarters of the globe, particularly those countries which are favoured with sunny skies. It is cultivated in Turkey, India, Persia, Egypt, Algeria and Australia, as well as in China.