ing substantial. These are the people who will tell you of
the lurking perils of certain quarters of London--how that there are
streets down which, even in broad daylight, the very police do not
venture unaccompanied. You may believe that, if you choose; it is simply
a tale for the soft-minded with a turn for the melodramatic. There is no
such thing as a dangerous street in London. I have loafed and wandered
in every part of London, slums, foreign quarters, underground, and
docksides, and if you must have adventure in London, then you will have
to make your own. The two fiercest streets of the metropolis--Dorset
Street and Hoxton Street--are as safe for the wayfarer as Oxford Street;
for women, safer. And the manners of Limehouse are certainly a lesson to
Streatham Hill.

But we are talking of opium. We left Mr. Tai Ling on the steps of the
Asiatics' Home, and from there we wandered to High Street, Poplar, to
the house of a gracious gentleman from Pi-chi-li, not for opium but for
a chat with him. For my companions had not smoked before, and I did not
want two helpless invalids on my hands at midnight. Those amazingly
thrilling and amazingly ludicrous stories of East End opium-rooms are
mainly, I may say, the work of journalistic specials. A journalistic
special is a man who writes thrillingly on old-fashioned topics on which
he is ill-informed. The moment he knows something about his subject he
is not allowed to write; he ceases to be a special. Also, of course, if
a man, on sociological investigation, puts an initial pipe of opium on
top of a brandy or so--well, one can understand that even the interior
of the Bayswater omnibus may be a haunt of terror and wonder. Taking a
jolt of "chandu" in a Limehouse room is about as exciting as taking a
mixed vermuth at the Leicester Lounge.

The gracious gentleman received us affably. Through a curtained recess
was the small common room, where yellow and black men reclined, in a
purple dusk, beaded with the lights of little lamps. The odour was
sickly, the air dry. The gentleman wondered whether we would have a
room. No, we wouldn't; but I bought cigarettes, and we went upstairs to
the little dirty bedrooms. The bed is but a mattress with a pillow.
There, if you are a dope-fiend, you may have your pipe and lamp, very
cosy, and you may lock the door, and the room is yours until you have
finished. One has read, in periodicals, of the well-to-do people from
the western end, who hir