urist. The Chinese women of small feet, or rather no feet at all,
walk, or attempt to walk, in a peculiar way. It is as if one were on
stilts. The feet are nothing but stumps, while the ankles are large,
almost unnatural in their development. It is indeed a great deformity.
The feet are shrunken to less size than an infant's; but they have not
the beauty of a baby's feet, which have in them great possibilities
and a world of suggestion and romance and poetry. If the Chinese
custom had prevailed among the ancient Hebrew people, think you that
King Solomon in singing of the graces of the Shulamite, who represents
the Church mystically, would ever have exclaimed,--"How beautiful
are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter!" We should have lost,
moreover, much that is noble in art, and the poetic creations of Greek
sculptors would never have delighted the eye nor enchained the fancy.

In our perambulations about Chinatown, we must next visit an
opium-joint. This mysterious place was situated in a long, rambling
building through which we had to move cautiously so as not to stumble
into some pit or dangerous hole or trap-door. Here were no electric
lights to drive away the gloom, here no gas-jets to show us where we
were treading, nothing but an occasional lamp dimly burning. Yet we
went on as if drawn by a magic spell. At last we were ushered into a
room poorly furnished. It was not more than twelve feet square, and in
the corner was an apology for a bed. On this was stretched an old man
whose face was sunken, whose eyes were lusterless, whose hand was long
and thin and bony, and whose voice was attenuated and pitched in a
falsetto key. The guide said that this old Chinaman was sixty-eight
years of age, and that he had had a life of varied experience. He was
a miner by profession, but had spent all his earnings long ago, and
was now an object of charity as well as of pity. Indeed he was the
very embodiment of misery, a wretched, woebegone, human being! He had
lost one arm in an accident during his mining days. Chinamen in the
thirst for gold had mining claims as well as Anglo-Saxons. This desire
for the precious metal seems to be universal. All men more or less
love gold; and for its acquisition they will undergo great hardship,
face peril, risk their lives. This aged Chinaman for whom there was no
future except to join his ancestors in another life, was now a pauper
notwithstanding all his quest for the treasures of the min