There is no Public Board of Works to superintend the construction of these, and as the Chinese as a race have very hazy and elementary ideas as to the necessity for drains of any kind, it may easily be imagined how badly they make them. The result is that gases generate and evil smells collect for which there is no escape excepting through the cracks of the stone slabs that pave the streets. Never has there yet been a writer with the genius to describe these. It is simply enough to say that they have the concentrated essence of the ages in them. They trace back their ancestry to the times that are lost in myth and fairy tales, and they would look with disdain upon any of the modern smells, just as an aristocrat that holds his title from the times of the Conqueror would gaze with scorn upon some upstart, whose father sold soap and was knighted for the wealth he had amassed. It is astonishing that the people that live in the houses near by are not carried off by typhoid or other deadly fevers, but they are not. They have, on the other hand, a lively, healthy look about them as though they lived in some country place, where the air comes fresh from the mountain near by and where they breathe a wholesome stock of ozone all the year round. The fact of the matter is the Chinese have no belief in the word infection. There is nothing in this huge cumbrous language to express the idea of germ, bacillus and such like, and so when some terrible odour from a drain that is seething and frothing in the sun, such as would knock off the head of a water buffalo, the Chinese puckers up his nose for an instant and then puts on that childlike smile with which he so often adorns his countenance, and attends to his business without any more fuss. Now, this is one of the best streets in the town, and contains goods to the value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some of the wealthiest merchants in the town have their places of business in it, and yet there is not one to be compared with any ordinary shop that one meets with in any of the ordinary streets that abound in our cities in the West. They have all a comparatively mean-looking appearance. They are only one storey high and have no fronts in them. When the shutters are taken down in the morning, the whole of the interior is at once laid bare to the public gaze, and as only the poorer shops attempt to display the goods they have for sale, one can see nothing but rolls on the shelves, and drawers tightly closed, and a number of Chinamen lounging about in a free and easy way, who are really clerks, but who act with a freedom that would ensure them being packed off at a moment's notice by any vigilant shop-walker in a good business house in England.