It always seemed strange—I write in the past, for, though the little cosmopolitan restaurant is still in being, the old people have relinquished their share of it, and it has changed its quarters, thereby losing some of its indefinable charm; it seemed strange, I say, to come out of such an atmosphere into the wide, dreary drabness of Lonsdale Street, so nearly repellent, indeed, in its entire lack of expression or soul, that often enough we would turn aside toward Little Burke Street, to soak ourselves afresh in that “something different” towards which we are all for ever striving. Long ago I wrote for a Melbourne paper an article on “Lilly Bulke Street”—which, with the cosmopolitan café, was the only possible hunting-ground for “something different” in the whole city—that was translated and republished in a Chinese paper, giving me a sort of fame among its denizens; so that: “You the lady that like Lilly Bulke Street?” they would often say to me, with their slow smile of sympathy; and of appreciation, too, for a little thought, a little understanding. Lately, since the opium laws have become so stringent, the people are shy of Europeans in their shops and “fan-tan” rooms; but only a little while before I could go anywhere I liked, and did so. Into the upper rooms of the few Chinese who were married to women of their own race, to talk, and sip tea, and play with the solemn-eyed children; even into the opium dens, where men reposed sleeping off the effects of the drug with a seraphic expression; or sat puffing, fiercely and wildly anxious for the coming of the rainbow-tinted dreams, which would, for a while, shut away from them all the hard and sordid realities of life. After dark Little Burke is bordered, save for a few Chinese chemists’ shops and eating-houses, by jealously closed doors, through which not one single crack of light penetrates. Some have a name above the lintel or a sentence in Chinese; and though one may not remember the name or understand the sentence, one soon knows what places are worth entering, and, pushing open the door, pass in, secure in the knowledge that though one may be met with the cold inquiring stare of many narrow inscrutable eyes—and a dead silence where there has before been a babel of voices—one will encounter no incivility, no insolent look or gesture. Sometimes the dim, narrow door opens into an even narrower passage, or a little ante-room leading into a larger apartment, where in a recess, on a bracket—beneath which a joss-stick or so sends up a blue spiral of scented smoke—a plaster figure of Buddha, resplendent in gold and crimson, sits smiling his tolerant, far-seeing smile, out over the heads of thirty or more men all intent upon a game of fan-tan.