low shops peer at you. In the sharp shadows their
lights fall like swords across your path. The shuttered gloom of the
eastern side shows strangely menacing. Each whispering house seems an
abode of dread things. Each window seems filled with frightful eyes.
Each corner, half-lit by a timid gas-jet, seems to harbour unholy
features. A black man, with Oriental features, brushes against you. You
collide with a creeping yellow man. He says something--it might be
Chinese or Japanese or Philippinese jargon. A huge Hindoo shuffles,
cat-like, against the shops. A fried-fish bar, its windows covered with
Scandinavian phrases, flings a burst of melodious light for which you
are grateful.

No; chaste was certainly not the right word. Say, rather, furtive,
sinister. You are in Limehouse. The peacefulness seems to be that
attendant upon underhand designs, and the twilight is that of people who
love it because their deeds are evil.

But now we come to Pennyfields, to the thunderous shadows of the great
Dock, and to that low-lit Causeway that carries such subtle tales of
flowered islands, white towns, green bays, and sunlight like wine. At
the mouth of Pennyfields is a cluster of Chinks. You may see at once
that they dislike you.

But my friend Sam Tai Ling will give us better welcome, I think; so we
slip into the Causeway, with its lousy shop-fronts decorated with
Chinese signs, among them the Sign of the Foreign Drug Open Lamp. At
every doorway stand groups of the gallant fellows, eyeing appreciatively
such white girls as pass that way. You taste the curious flavour of the
place--its mixture of camaraderie and brutality, of cruelty and pity and
tears; of precocious children and wrecked men--and you smell its
perfume, the week before last. But here is the home of Tai Ling, one of
the most genial souls to be met in a world of cynicism and dyspepsia: a
lovable character, radiating sweetness and a tolerably naughty goodness
in this narrow street. Not immoral, for to be immoral you must first
subscribe to some conventional morality. Tai Ling does not. You cannot
do wrong until you have first done right. Tai Ling has not. He is just
non-moral; and right and wrong are words he does not understand. He is
in love with life and song and wine and the beauty of women. The world
to him is a pause on a journey, where one may take one's idle pleasure
while others strew the path with mirth and roses. He knows only two
divisions of people: the ga