If the Chinese must go they will have to close up the large theatres in San Francisco owned and controlled by Celestial managers. In these temples of the almond-eyed Thespis extraordinary plays are enacted running through months and even years, in a to-be-continued style, for, the Chinese dramatist, who never writes anything but tragedy of the wildest and most harrowing kind, always begins with the birth of his hero or heroine and does not let the merest incident pass until his or her friends are ready to sit down to a feast of roast pig and rice by the side of the principal character's grave. The dramas are mainly historical, and many a Chinaman who starts in to see a first-class play of the average length is on his way back to China in a coffin or box with his cue neatly folded around him for a burial robe, long before the last act of the drama is reached. So, too, the star actors frequently die before they have time to finish the play. I don't know that any American has ever had the patience to wait for the denouement of a Chinese drama, but to the saffron-skinned, horse-hair-surmounted and slanting-eyed citizen of San Francisco, his theatre is a place next in importance to the Joss House or temple, and when he once buys his season ticket for a show, he sticks to it with a pertinacity that would put an ordinary glue or cement advertisement to the blush. It is the same, too, when they patronize a theatre in which the surroundings and language are English; once in their seats, they stay--forgetting even to go out between the acts for an opera-glass or a bottle of pop. But to return to the Chinese theatre. Its interior differs very little from the interior of the places of amusement frequented by his American brother. The general contour and arrangement of the auditorium is pretty much the same. The men sit together on benches partitioned off into single seats in the lower portion of the house, or pit, with their little round hats on, and their pipes or cigars in their mouths; the ladies, who are not allowed into the male portion of the auditorium, have galleries for themselves whence they look down upon the actions of their male friends below. Everywhere except on the stage quiet and the utmost serenity prevail, no person in the audience moving a hand, raising a foot, or opening a lip, even when the villain is cut into ribbons by the Sunday-school hero; and at no stage of the performance does the slightest manifestation of delight or disapprobation come from the patient and enduring on-looker. In this respect John Chinamen has neglected to take a lesson from his American cousin, or to acquire the character of the howling short-haired gentlemen who apotheosize Dennis Kearney and think there is no better worshipping place in the world than "the sand lots."