d sweeping at
times, promoted by ignorance and excess among strangers and seamen.

One soon learns to detect an opium-eating people, and here we found
examples all about us in every relation of life. It is a vice nearly
always pursued in secret, but its traces upon the heavy, bleared eye and
sallow features are plain and disfiguring enough. The disgraceful trade
in the fatal drug, forced upon China by the English at the point of the
bayonet, flourishes and increases, forming the heaviest item of import.
It seems almost incredible that a people can long exist and consume such
large quantities of this active poison. Other forms of stimulants are
seldom resorted to by the natives, and an intoxicated person is
scarcely, if ever, met with among the Chinese population. As to
Europeans, it is the same here as it is in India, the habit of drinking
freely of spirituous liquors is universal, and one half the invalidism
which is attributed to climate should be ascribed to indulgence in hard
drinking.

The streets of Hong Kong afford strange local pictures. The shoemaker
industriously plies his trade in the open thoroughfare; cooking goes on
in the gutters beside the sidewalks filling the atmosphere with greasy
odors; the itinerant peddler, with a wooden box hung from his neck,
disposes of food made from mysterious sources; the street barber is seen
actively employed out of doors; the milkman drives his goats to the
customer's door and there milks the required quantity; the Chinese
themselves ignore the article altogether. The universal fan is carried
by men, not by women, and when the owner is not using it, he thrusts it
in the back of his neck with the handle protruding. Sedan chairs are
rushing hither and thither, borne upon men's shoulders, transporting
both natives and Europeans on business errands. Here, as in southern
Italy, one observes a propensity to eat, sleep, live, and die in the
streets, exhibited by the mass of the population.

Imagine a short, slouchy figure, with sloping eyes, a yellow complexion,
features characterized by a sort of low cunning, a shaved head with a
pigtail, clad in a loose cloth blouse, half shirt and half jacket,
continuations not exactly pants nor yet a petticoat, and shoes
thick-soled and shearing upwards like a Madras surf-boat, and you have
John Chinaman as he appears at home. The portrait is universal. One
Chinaman is as like another as two peas,--a uniformity often leading to
ludicrous m