The Joss-house at Singapore is as fine, though it may be not as large, as any to be seen in China. An elaborately-designed and gaudily-ornamented pagoda, of colored porcelain, rises from its centre; its doorway is guarded by two gorgons dire, in a sitting posture, in whose snarling mouths large balls have been ingeniously carved, so that you may place your hand between the teeth and roll them about, yet the whole is cut from a block of blue flinty granite. The court and alley are paved with colored porcelain tiles, while the altar and the sleepy idol that fills its rear, are decorated expensively and fantastically. One of the wings of this temple, from which issued a more cook-shop than savory smell, I noticed was appropriated as a kind of popular restaurant, and filled with Chinamen down to the lower cooly, all seated at small tables, uttering their mushy jargon, and bolting with chop-sticks the boiled paddy. Their proximity to their “Joss-pigeon” neither restrained their appetites nor their noisiness. “John Chinaman” will tell you that “Joss” (a word which they are supposed to have gotten by a corruption of “Dios” from their Portuguese neighbors at Macao) is a very good man, but that there is no reason why he should have a large temple all to himself. Opposite the temple I saw the first Chinese “Sing-Song,” a street-theatre, made by the elevation of a staging of bamboos covered with mats. Upon “these our players,” gaudily attired, and accompanied by caterwauling instruments and “tom-toms,” appear to the infinite delight of their street auditors, who guffaw loud their approval, as they stand protected from the sun under their paper umbrellas. At Singapore is the prison in which nearly all the convicts from the possessions of the English are confined, and a collection of more villanous visages could not be met with in the walls of any other jail. Those who have been convicted of murder, have the word “Doomga”—Hindostanee for their crime— branded on their forehead. Those who have been guilty of lesser offences are put into chain-gangs, and made to keep the road in order. There was one inmate, in the person of a negro, from Long Island, who had been sentenced for fifteen years.