Little, dark, stifling cells—I have seen infinitely better ones in prisons—lit through a little window by a caged gas-jet on the flagged and iron-railed footway which ran round each floor inside the court within which these doss-houses are built. In the cell a narrow wooden bedstead, covered with unwashed rags and nothing else. Below in the court, horrors unnameable. In the particular lodging-house which I visited I was shown a big, dark, hideous apartment, a perfect Black Hole, in which nine of the richest merchants of Chinatown—and some of them are very rich—were confined on ransom by the gang known as the High-Binders for four months until some died and the others paid. A remnant who stuck out were released by the police and a detachment of the United States Militia after a regular siege. It was Alsatia over again, and yet it happened less than a dozen years ago. As I was feeling my way down the stairs a figure rose out of a corner on one of the landings, and I heard a thin voice say: “Boss, gimme ten cents—I’m hungry!” It was the first time I had ever heard an American beg, and it was quite a shock. Somehow, the accent seemed to add an infinite pathos to the words; perhaps because until now I had only heard it from the lips of the proudly prosperous. As I passed he turned his face after me, and the light from a distant gas-lamp fell on it. It was ghastly in its thinness and paleness, and yet it was refined, and the voice, if not the speech, was that of an educated man. I gave him a quarter, and my guide said: “Guess that’ll give him two days in heaven. It’s opium he’s hungry for. Bin there myself.” When we left the lodging-house we went a few yards along the crowded, weirdly lit street with its swarms of paper-lanterns, and then we plunged down a narrow alley up which there drifted a wave of stench, dominated by the acrid, penetrating smell of opium. Presently I discovered that there were lower depths in Chinatown even than the doss-house and the brothel. Here were not houses, only miserable sheds and shanties round an unpaved courtyard foul beyond description. We went into some of the shanties. There stood in each near the door a little bench, and on this were two or three pipes and some tiny pots filled with what looked like black-brown treacle. It was opium, and each pot contained ten cents’ worth of Heaven and Hell, the Heaven of oblivion opening out into dreamland of Paradise, and then the Hell of the awakening horror. Behind the bench squatted a half-clad skeleton, pipe in hand and lamp beside him. He opened his half-shut eyes as we entered, and murmured: “Wantee smoke, tlen cent!” Then he recognised my guide, and added, “Ah, wantee look; all light.” Then his eyelids fell again, he dipped his needle in his pot, and got ready for another whiff.