"No shavee--no shavee," he chattered, simian fashion, squinting from one to the other of us with his twinkling eyes. "Too late! Shuttee shop!" "Don't you come none of it wi' me!" roared Smith, in a voice of amazing gruffness, and shook an artificially dirtied fist under the Chinaman's nose. "Get inside and gimme an' my mate a couple o' pipes. Smokee pipe, you yellow scum--savvy?" My friend bent forward and glared into the other's eyes with a vindictiveness that amazed me, unfamiliar as I was with this form of gentle persuasion. "Kop 'old o' that," he said, and thrust a coin into the Chinaman's yellow paw. "Keep me waitin' an' I'll pull the dam' shop down, Charlie. You can lay to it." "No hab got pipee--" began the other. Smith raised his fist, and Yan capitulated. "Allee lightee," he said. "Full up--no loom. You come see." He dived behind the dirty curtain, Smith and I following, and ran up a dark stair. The next moment I found myself in an atmosphere which was literally poisonous. It was all but unbreathable, being loaded with opium fumes. Never before had I experienced anything like it. Every breath was an effort. A tin oil-lamp on a box in the middle of the floor dimly illuminated the horrible place, about the walls of which ten or twelve bunks were ranged and all of them occupied. Most of the occupants were lying motionless, but one or two were squatting in their bunks noisily sucking at the little metal pipes. These had not yet attained to the opium-smoker's Nirvana. "No loom--samee tella you," said Shen-Yan, complacently testing Smith's shilling with his yellow, decayed teeth. Smith walked to a corner and dropped cross-legged, on the floor, pulling me down with him. "Two pipe quick," he said. "Plenty room. Two piecee pipe--or plenty heap trouble." A dreary voice from one of the bunks came: "Give 'im a pipe, Charlie, curse yer! an' stop 'is palaver." Yan performed a curious little shrug, rather of the back than of the shoulders, and shuffled to the box which bore the smoky lamp. Holding a needle in the flame, he dipped it, when red-hot, into an old cocoa tin, and withdrew it with a bead of opium adhering to the end. Slowly roasting this over the lamp, he dropped it into the bowl of the metal pipe which he held ready, where it burned with a spirituous blue flame. "Pass it over," said Smith huskily, and rose on his knees with the assumed eagerness of a slave to the drug. Yan handed him the pipe, which he promptly put to his lips, and prepared another for me. "Whatever you do, don't inhale any," came Smith's whispered injunction. It was with a sense of nausea greater even than that occasioned by the disgusting atmosphere of the den that I took the pipe and pretended to smoke. Taking my cue from my friend, I allowed my head gradually to sink lower and lower, until, within a few minutes, I sprawled sideways on the floor, Smith lying close beside me.