We entered only three of the Austrian dens. But we saw the signs and glanced in through the doorways of so many others that I was quite ready to accept Mr. Sung's rough estimate of the total number within the narrow confines of the concession: he put it at fifty to one hundred. It is difficult to be exact in these estimates, because where laws are so languidly enforced the official returns hardly begin to state the full number of flourishing establishments. These three dens which we entered were enough to make an ineffaceable impression on the mind of one traveller. I have eaten and slept in native hostelries, in the interior, so unspeakably dirty and insanitary that to describe them in these pages would exceed all bounds of taste, but I have never been in a filthier place than at least one of these Austrian dens. And the other two were little better. It would require some means more adequate than pen, ink, and paper, to convey to the reader an accurate notion of the mingled, half-blended odours which seemed to underlie, or to form a background for, the overpowering fumes of what passed here for opium. What this drug compound was I really do not know; but it was sold at the rate of two pipes for three cents, Mexican, equivalent to a cent and a half, gold. For real opium, of fair or good quality, it is quite possible, in China, to pay from ten to twenty times as much. Such dens as this, then, are not only vicious resorts maintained for the purpose of catering to a degrading habit; they are also breeding places of disease and pestilence. Thus one night's work made it plain that the foreign concessions were taking no steps that would evidence a spirit of cooeperation with the Chinese authorities in their vigorous attempt to check and control the ravages of opium. Tientsin, like Shanghai, did not care. Tientsin, like Shanghai, is sowing the wind in China. Let us now turn aside for a moment to consider the third important point of contact between the two kinds of civilization--Hongkong.