An opium den usually takes up one floor of a building. Against the walls is a continuous wooden platform, perhaps two feet high and extending over seven or eight feet into the room. This platform is divided at intervals of five or six feet by low partitions, sometimes but a few inches in height, into compartments, each of which accommodates two smokers, with one lamp between them. Sometimes a rug or a bit of matting is laid on this hard couch, sometimes not; for the Chinaman, accustomed to sleeping on bricks, prefers his couches hard. A man always lies down to smoke opium; for the porous pill, which is pressed into the tiny orifice of the pipe, cannot be ignited, but is held directly over the lamp and the flame drawn up through it. The first den we entered was on the second floor of a rickety building. We climbed the steep, infinitely dirty stairway, crossed a narrow hall, and opened a door. At first I found it difficult to see distinctly in the dim light and through the thick blue haze; and the overpowering, sickish fumes of the drug got into my nose and throat and made breathing a noticeable effort. There was a desk by the door, behind which sat the keeper of the den, with a litter of pipes and thimble-like cups before him. In a corner of the desk was a jar of opium, a thick, sticky substance, dark brown in colour, in appearance not unlike molasses in January. There were twenty smokers on the couches, some preparing the pellet of opium by kneading it and pressing it on the pipe-bowl, some dozing off the fumes, and a few smoking. An attendant moved about the room with fresh supplies of the drug. For each thimbleful, enough for one or two smokes, the price was fifteen cents (Mexican). The smokers seemed to be mainly of the lower classes; though hardly so low as coolies, who are lucky to earn as much as fifteen cents in a day. It was evident to both of my companions, from the appearance of these men and from their talk, that they could ill afford the luxury. The number of smokes indulged in seemed to range from three or four up to an indefinite number. The youngest and healthiest appearing man in the room told us that after three pipes he could go home and go to sleep in comfort. He had been at it less than a year, he said; and, judging from the expression of peaceful content that came over his face as he held the pipe-bowl over the lamp and drew the smoke deep into his lungs, he had not yet begun to feel the ravages of the drug.