In other dressing-rooms we found mild-eyed Celestials trying on or taking off masks hideous enough to frighten even an American baby. The rooms were merely little cellars connected by narrow, low, stone passages. Their furniture was a little table under the mirror, a big, brass-bound chest, on which stood the inevitable opium apparatus, and a low, dirty sleeping-couch. The whole scene was literally a piece of the underworld. A few years ago it was veritably so for unfortunates who were decoyed into its depths and never got out again. That is done with now, but for all that I felt better when I was out in the street again. If I had dreamt that night, the dream would certainly have been a nightmare. As it is, whenever I hear any one letting his emotions loose over the glories and triumphs of civilisation I think of Chinatown, San Francisco, and remain in a comparatively humble frame of mind. _A SEA-INTERLUDE_ ACROSS THE PACIFIC ON A STEAM-ROLLER (WITH INCIDENTAL REMARKS ON THE PARADISE THEREOF AND THE GREAT TROPICAL FRAUD) I By the end of my third day’s stay in San Francisco a splendid sea-wind had blown the smell of Chinatown out of my nostrils, and the mephitic stuffiness of its streets and shops and restaurants out of my lungs. I would fain have stayed longer, for I was beginning to like the Queen of the Golden Shore, and some of her loyal subjects were beginning to like me, wherefore there was every prospect of a goodly time ahead for me. When your Californian likes you he wants to give you his house, and his town, and his clubs, and all that therein is, and when he doesn’t he makes no secret of it. But for the man who has connections to make, who has to hitch trains on to steamers and steamers on to trains, and get across the world in the shortest possible time, even the temptations of Californian hospitality must be in vain. So the next morning I and my baggage were jolted over a couple of miles of appalling streets—the one defect in the beauty of the Golden City—at a cost of three dollars and partial dislocation of the vertebral column, to the wharf where a very polite citizen was obliging enough to carry my steamer trunk on board the _Nippon Maru_, for half a dollar more.