The end of the alley was completely blocked by a double folding door, with boss-shaped brass lock of native pattern. On this portal I knocked. There was no reply. Then I tried the "opium-den" rat-tat, a bit of special knowledge I had often found effective in the past. Still the door remained close shut; but for certain muffled sounds of revelry beyond it I should have concluded there was nobody to answer my summons. At last, however, one half of the door came a few inches ajar, and a puckered yellow face showed in the chink. Here, too, there seemed an odd hint of the fatalistic. I'd never been to this den before, yet I recognised the doorkeeper at once--perhaps from some former visit to a dive of similar kind. The doorkeeper likewise recognised me, and after some hesitation allowed me to enter. There was a small porch behind the door, plunged in pitch dark, through which we passed into the den itself. It was of the usual pattern for places of the sort, but a good deal larger, and had also about it palpable signs of foreign influence. The walls were lined with squalid-looking couches, where natives in all degrees of robustness or decrepitude reclined drowsily over their opium pipes, but the nave of the dim-lit hall was dotted here and there with ramshackle tables and chairs after the fashion of a European drinking hell, and at one end was, apparently, a low stage, now screened off by a silk curtain across which yellow dragons were chasing wisps of conventional whorled cloud. Manifestly this half-breed den was wont to cater not so much for the unsophisticated native as for the sea-going, semi-Europeanised type, and for that queer underworld of foreigners of the beach-combing class. Hence the dramatic stage and the grotesquely incongruous restaurant tables, and the "fire-water" which I saw--and smelt even above the sickly reek of opium--to be on sale in the place.