The throngs of customers that keep the pawnshops crowded with pledges
are probably most of them victims of the gambling-table or the
opium-den. They come from every house that employs them; your domestic
is impatient of delay, and hastens through his daily task in order that
he may nightly indulge his darling sin.

The opium habit prevails to an alarming extent throughout the country,
but no race is so dependent on this seductive and fatal stimulant as the
Chinese. There are several hundred dens in San Francisco where, for a
very moderate sum, the coolie may repair, and revel in dreams that end
in a death-like sleep.

Let us pause at the entrance of one of these pleasure-houses. Through
devious ways we follow the leader, and come at last to a cavernous
retreat. The odors that salute us are offensive; on every hand there is
an accumulation of filth that should naturally, if it does not, breed
fever and death. Forms press about us in the darkness, - forms that
hasten like shadows toward that den of shades. We enter by a small door
that is open for a moment only, and find ourselves in an apartment about
fifteen feet square. We can touch the ceiling on tiptoe, yet there are
three tiers of bunks placed with headboards to the wall, and each bunk
just broad enough for two occupants. It is like the steerage in an
emigrant vessel, eminently shipshape. Every bunk is filled; some of the
smokers have had their dream and lie in grotesque attitudes, insensible,
ashen-pale, having the look of plague-stricken corpses.

Some are dreaming; you see it in the vacant eye, the listless face, the
expression that betrays hopeless intoxication. Some are preparing the
enchanting pipe, - a laborious process, that reminds one of an
incantation. See those two votaries lying face to face, chatting in low