Huddled or curled up on these mattresses lay two wretched smokers--one of them with the whites, or, I should say, "yellows," of his eyes turned up to the ceiling, and another, whose slumbers we had apparently disturbed, staring about him with a dazed and stupefied air. Something in the look of these men--either the ghastly pallor of their complexion, or the listlessness of their bearing--reminded me not a little of the "white lepers" of Norway. I have seen patients in the hospitals there whose general aspect greatly resembled that of these men, although the skin of the white leper has more of a milky appearance--as if it had been bleached, in fact--than that of the opium-smoker, which is dirtier and more yellow. The remaining occupants of the den, two of whom were Chinamen, were wide awake. The third was a partly naked Malay of decidedly evil aspect, who shrank back on my entrance, and coiled himself up in the recesses of a dark corner, whence he lay furtively watching me, very much in the same way in which the prisoned pythons in a serpent-house watch the visitors who come to tap at the glass of their cages. The Chinamen, however, seemed pleased to see me; and, after I had handed my cigar-case to the nearest, begging that he and his friend would help themselves, they became quite companionable. One of them, to my surprise, immediately relinquished the drug which he had been smoking, and began to suck with evident relish at the cigar. The other, after pocketing the weed, lay down on his back with his arms behind his head, and with his legs drawn up to his body, in which singularly graceful and easy attitude he carried on a conversation with his friend, watching me narrowly all the time, through the chink between his knees. At this point of my visit, and before I could take any further stock of the surroundings, I was not a little surprised by the entrance of a young, and by no means ill-looking Englishwoman, to whom I gave a civil "good evening," receiving, however, only a suspicious and surly nod in reply. She occupied herself at first by tickling one of the Chinamen under the armpits, evidently finding no little amusement in the fits of wild, unearthly, and uncontrollable laughter into which he broke, but growing weary of this, she seated herself on the raised mattress where I was located, and proceeded to take stock of her visitor. Beginning at my boots, and travelling up by way of trousers and waistcoat, up to my collar and face, she examined me so critically and searchingly from head to foot that I fancied once or twice I could see the row of figures she was inwardly casting up, and could hear her saying to herself, "Boots and trousers, say, sixty bob; and watch and chain, a couple of flimsies each; which, with coat and waistcoat, bring it up to thirty shiners; which, with a couple of fivers for links, loose cash and studs make about forty quid--that's _your_ figure young man, as near as I can reckon it." [Illustration: A MALAY.]