announce to his friends that his purposes are good and innocent.
Though in the same category as the sword or dagger hidden in a
walking-stick or a concealed weapon, this bloodthirsty knife will
repose harmlessly in its fan-case like a sleeping babe in his cradle.

A Chinese boarding house next claimed our inspection. It was rather a
forbidding place, but no doubt the Chinaman was well content with its
accommodations. It was a long, rambling structure, and it seemed to me
as if I were going through an underground passage in walking from room
to room. The various halls were narrow, indeed so narrow that two
persons meeting in them could not without difficulty pass each other.
The beds, which brought a dollar a month, were one above another in
tiers or recesses in the walls. Generally a curtain of a reddish hue
depended in front of them. They reminded one of the berths in a ship
or of the repositories of the dead in the Roman Catacombs. Two
hundred and twenty-five persons were lodged in this dark, mysterious
labyrinth. In another house there were five hundred and fifty people
lodged in seventy-five rooms. Possibly the owners of tenement houses
in our large cities, who crowd men and women into a narrow space
and through unpitying agents reap a rich harvest regardless of the
sufferings of their fellow-beings, have been taking lessons from the
landlords of Chinatown. I said to myself, as I went to and fro through
these narrow passages, dimly lighted with a lamp, and the lights were
few and far between, if a fire should break out, at midnight, when all
are wrapt in slumber, what a holocaust would be here! And whose would
the sin and the shame be? There are good and ample fire-appliances for
the protection of the city, but the poor Chinamen hemmed in, as in a
dark prison-house, would surely be suffocated by smoke or be consumed
in the flames. When the old theatre was burned down, twenty-five men,
and probably more, perished, although there were means of escape from