Round the walls of the shanty were two tiers of bunks, just a few planks propped on bare poles. There were ragged blankets on the boards, and on these, with pipe and pot and lamp, lay other scantily clad skeletons, some frizzling the globule of opium in the flame, some rolling it on the flat top of the pipe-bowl, others inhaling the magic blue smoke, others motionless and lifeless, their souls, if they had any, in paradise. One of the skeletons had once been the figure of a white woman. Outside we found other hovels, but without lamps. We struck matches in one, and found other figures, some white and some yellow, huddled about the filthy floor. “Free dosses,” said the guide, in his curt speech, “they’re broke. Spent their last dime on a smoke and got fired. After that it’s the poor-house or the bay.” As we were picking our way out of the court, he continued: “There’s a cocaine fiend here; better see him. George, where are you?” The remains of a man tottered out from under a shed. He was white, what there was left of him. As soon as his miserable eyes caught sight of me he began a whining, rambling account of how he fell a victim to the drug; his stock narrative, I suppose. Then he rolled up a dirty, ragged shirt sleeve, and showed me a thing of skin and bone that had once been an arm. It was pitted and seamed and scratched from elbow to wrist. I had seen two or three choice samples of leprosy and other diseases that horrible night, but this made me nearer sick than any of them. He had a strangely extemporised syringe of wood and quill and sealing-wax, and a piece of hypodermic needle in his other hand. He picked out a comparatively vacant spot, drove in the needle, and pushed. The skin swelled up in a little lump. It may only have been water, certainly the syringe was made ready for the occasion, but in a moment or two he straightened up, his eye grew brighter, and his voice stronger as he asked me for a dime to buy a supper. I gave it to him, and he crept back into his hovel. I went out into the street feeling that I had been in Hell. We went to wind up the night at the Chinese Theatre; but the performance was nearly over. So, instead, we made a much more interesting excursion through the subterranean dressing-rooms of the company. Women never appear on Chinese boards. So when we visited the ladies’ dressing-rooms we found men and boys in female attire, which, after all, doesn’t differ very much from the male, standing before little mirrors painting and powdering themselves and making-up their eyes and eyebrows, and fixing themselves up generally for all the world like an European actress.