“What are we going to see?” “Japanese gir--No, we aren’t, by Jove! Catch that Chinaman, _quick_.” The pigtail is trying to double back across a courtyard into an inner chamber; but a large hand on his shoulder spins him round and puts him in rear of the line of advancing Englishmen, who are, be it observed, making a fair amount of noise with their boots. A second door is thrown open, and the visitors advance into a large, square room blazing with gas. Here thirteen pigtails, deaf and blind to the outer world, are bending over a table. The captured Chinaman dodges uneasily in the rear of the procession. Five--ten--fifteen seconds pass, the Englishmen standing in the full light less than three paces from the absorbed gang who see nothing. Then burly Superintendent Lamb brings down his hand on his thigh with a crack like a pistol-shot and shouts: “How do, John?” Follows a frantic rush of scared Celestials, almost tumbling over each other in their anxiety to get clear. Gudgeon before the rush of the pike are nothing to John Chinaman detected in the act of gambling. One pigtail scoops up a pile of copper money, another a chinaware soup-bowl, and only a little mound of accusing cowries remains on the white matting that covers the table. In less than half a minute two facts are forcibly brought home to the visitor. First, that a pigtail is largely composed of silk, and rasps the palm of the hand as it slides through; and secondly, that the forearm of a Chinaman is surprisingly muscular and well-developed. “What’s going to be done?” “Nothing. They’re only three of us, and all the ringleaders would get away. Look at the doors. We’ve got ’em safe any time we want to catch ’em, if this little visit doesn’t make ’em shift their quarters. Hi! John. No pidgin to-night. Show how you makee play. That fat youngster there is our informer.” Half the pigtails have fled into the darkness, but the remainder, assured and trebly assured that the Police really mean “no pidgin,” return to the table and stand round while the croupier proceeds to manipulate the cowries, the little curved slip of bamboo and the soup-bowl. They never gamble, these innocents. They only come to look on, and smoke opium in the next room. Yet as the game progresses their eyes light up, and one by one they drop in to deposit their pice on odd or even--the number of the cowries that are covered and left uncovered by the little soup-bowl. _Mythan_ is the name of the amusement, and, whatever may be its demerits, it is _clean_. The Police look on while their charge plays and loots a parchment-skinned horror--one of Swift’s Struldbrugs, strayed from Laputa--of the enormous sum of two annas. The return of this wealth, doubled, sets the loser beating his forehead against the table from sheer gratitude. “_Most_ immoral game this. A man might drop five whole rupees, if he began playing at sundown and kept it up all night. Don’t _you_ ever play whist occasionally?”