of a myriad humming bees shut in clustering hives; close about us were
housed near twenty thousand souls; shops were open; discordant
orchestras resounded from the theaters; in a dark passage we saw the
flames playing upon the thresholds of infamy to expel the evil shades.

Away off in the Bay in the moonlight glimmered the ribbed sail of a
fishing-junk, and the air was heavy with an indefinable odor which to
this hour puzzles me; but it must be attributed either to sink or
sandalwood - perchance to both!

"It is a little bit of old China, this quarter of ours," said the
artist, rising to go. And so it is, saving only a noticeable lack of
dwarfed trees and pale pagodas and sprays of willowy bamboo; of clumsy
boats adrift on tideless streams; of toy-like tea-gardens hanging among
artificial rocks, and of troops of flat-faced but complaisant people
posing grotesquely in ridiculous perspective.