the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochoofoo, Ningpo and Shanghai. The importation of opium from India is still carried on--but the quantity is not so great as formerly, owing to the cultivation of the plant in China. The Hong Kong government has an opium farm, for which to-day it receives a rental of $15,500 per month. The farmer sells on an average from eight to ten _tins_ of opium daily, the tins being worth about $150 each. His entire receipts from his sales of the drug are about $45,000 per month. This opium farmer is well known to be the largest smuggler of opium into China; and not without reason does Lord Charles Beresford, in his book "The Break-up of China," say: "Thus, indirectly the Hong Kong government derives a revenue by fostering an illegitimate trade with a neighbouring and friendly Power, which cannot be said to redound to the credit of the British Government. It is in direct opposition to the sentiments and tradition of the laws of the British Empire." It was here in Chinatown, in San Francisco, that I was brought face to face with the havoc that is made through the opium trade and the use of the pernicious drug in eating and smoking. I was told that Europeans and Americans sometimes sought the opium-joints for the purpose of indulgence in the vice of smoking. Even women were known to make use of it in this way. The old man whom I visited was lying on his left side, with his head slightly raised on a hard pillow covered with faded leather. He took the pipe in his right hand, the other, as I have already said, having been cut off in the mines. Then he laid down the pipe by his side with the stem near his mouth. The next movement was to take a kind of long rod, called a dipper, with a sharp end and a little flattened. This he dipped in the opium which had the consistency of thick molasses. He twisted the dipper round and then held the drop which adhered to it over the lamp, which was near him. He wound the dipper round and round until the opium was roasted and had a brown colour. He then thrust the end of the dipper with the prepared drug into the opening of the pipe, which was somewhat after the Turkish style with its long stem. He next held the bowl of the pipe over the lamp until the opium frizzled. Then putting the stem of the pipe in his mouth he inhaled the smoke, and almost immediately exhaled it through the mouth and nostrils. While smoking he removed the opium, going through the same process as before, and it all took about fifteen minutes. What the old man's feelings were he did not tell us, but he seemed very contented, as if then he cared for nothing, as if he had no concern for the world and its trials. But one must read the graphic pages of Thomas De Quincey in his "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," in order to know what are the joys and what the torments of him who is addicted to the use of the pernicious drug. It was while De Quincey was in Oxford that he came under its tyranny.