Just at this moment I was aware of a dull noise in the distance. There was a slight but ever-increasing vibration in the boards beneath me, a gathering rumble and roll as of approaching thunder, and with a hoarsely discordant shriek, an ear-splitting babel-tumult and roar, which seemed to shake the house to its foundations, an express train hurtled by, almost outside the very windows. Under the present condition of electric communication, and with no apparatus, the sending of a telephonic message for help to the police office would have been scarcely less impossible of accomplishment than making known my present danger to anyone on board the train; yet so unreasoning are we in the causes which arouse or allay our nervousness, that the consciousness of my near presence to the railway did more to bolster up my courage than all my philosophy. "With the trains and their living freights so near at hand, I don't feel altogether cut off from the outside world," I said to myself; and as the two men in the corner were still whispering together, I plucked up heart to take stock of my surroundings. The den was lit by a single paraffin lamp, to the unassisted industry of which I was at first inclined to ascribe the vile atmosphere of the place. "That light we see is burning in my hall. How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world," says Portia. The light which I saw burning in the den did not shed its beams very far; but in the matter of shedding smells in a world, nice or naughty, I judged its capacity at a low estimate as forty horse-power! An ordinary motor-car, in its most perfumed moments, leaves trailing clouds of glory and cherry blossom in its wake compared to that lamp's distribution of oily odours on the atmosphere. Add to this the insufferable and sickening stench of opium--a stench which I can only compare to a choice blending of onions and bad tobacco--and the reader will not wonder when I say that my stomach signalled for full speed astern, by retching rebelliously under my breast-bone. Greasy as was the atmosphere, the dirty yellow distempering of the walls was in places even greasier. The chief articles of furniture were two raised mattresses, the bare wall behind them being literally coated with dirt and grease, rubbed from the chaste persons and fastidious clothes of many smokers. Above these mattresses a crudely coloured and revolting representation of the Crucifixion was incontinently fastened, and upon the mattresses lay the Chinamen of whom I have already spoken.