In spite of its prosperity and importance, however, the town is anything but a pleasant place to stop in, and the foreign visitor soon gets tired of being jostled about by busy coolies and tipsy sailors. The great delight of the latter is to get drunk in the brandy-stores of Victoria Street, and then to dance, not, strange to say, with women, but without partners, to the music of a violin and a big drum. In the evening the floating and resident population alike resort in crowds to the opium-dens and houses of ill fame in the upper portions of the town. No one seems to feel any shame at being seen to enter these places, the windows of which are wide open, so that all can look into the brightly illuminated rooms, whence proceeds the sound of oaths in all manner of languages, whilst the loud clash of gongs mingles with the muffled songs of the Chinese beauties, and every now and then a shower of crackers is flung into the street below, bursting into zigzags of fire on the heads of the startled passers-by. In the eyes of the masters of the island, the intense commercial activity of the day atones for the dissipations of the night. [Illustration: FIG. 7.--HWANG-TIEN-SHANG TI, THE GOD OF HEAVEN. (_In the Guinet Museum._)] [Sidenote: THE GAME OF MORRA] Contact with Europeans has, however, done little if anything to modify the ideas and customs of the Chinese. A few of the great native merchants, it is true, are willing now and then to drink a glass of champagne with the representatives of foreign houses, and teach them the game of Morra, which, strange to say, is to all intents and purposes the same as that played all over Italy, and is so well described by Mrs. Eaton in her _Rome in the Nineteenth Century_. "Morra," she says, "is played by the men, and merely consists in holding up in rapid succession any number of fingers they please, calling out at the same time the number their antagonist shows.... Morra seems to differ in no respect from the _Micure Digitis_ of the Ancient Romans." If it be a fact, as some assert, that the various races of the world are more truly themselves in their games than in their work, this similarity in a pastime played by people so different as the Chinese and the Italians, would have a deep psychological significance.