place - but, heaven save us, how it smells!

We pass from one black hole to another. In the first there is a kind of
bin for ashes and coals, and there are pots and grills lying about - it
is the kitchen. A heap of fire kindling-wood in one corner, a bench or
stool as black as soot can paint it, a few bowls, a few bits of rags, a
few fragments of food, and a coolie squatting over a struggling fire, a
coolie who rises out of the dim smoke like the evil genii in the Arabian
tale. There is no chimney, there is no window, there is no drainage. We
are in a cubic sink, where we can scarcely stand erect. From the small
door pours a dense volume of smoke, some of it stale smoke, which our
entry has forced out of the corners; the kitchen will only hold so much
smoke, and we have made havoc among the cubic inches. Underfoot, the
thin planks sag into standing pools, and there is a glimmer of poisonous
blue just along the base of the blackened walls; thousands feed daily in
troughs like these!

The next apartment, smaller yet, and blacker and bluer, and more
slippery and slimy, is an uncovered cesspool, from which a sickening
stench exhales continually. All about it are chambers - very small ones,
- state-rooms let me call them, opening upon narrow galleries that run
in various directions, sometimes bridging one another in a marvelous and
exceedingly ingenious economy of space. The majority of these
state-rooms are just long enough to lie down in, and just broad enough
to allow a narrow door to swing inward between two single beds, with two
sleepers in each bed. The doors are closed and bolted; there is often no
window, and always no ventilation.

Our "special," by the authority vested in him, tries one door and
demands admittance. There is no response from within. A group of