walls of
steel plate and behind doors that, banged shut as they are at the
slightest sign of danger, would have to be battered down with sledges or
blown open with dynamite before one could gain admission, and by that
time the inmates would have all escaped and nothing would be left behind
to show the nature of the business carried on.

Crime runs rampant in this section of the town, and when a Chinaman is
murdered, in nine cases out of ten the slayer escapes punishment at the
hands of the law, though he may have it meted out to him in some
horrible form at the hands of the dead man's friends and relatives.

To go through the Chinese quarters by daylight is a sight well worth
seeing, but to go through there with a guide after the night's dark
shadows have fallen, is more than that. It is a revelation. These guides
are licensed by the city, and are under the protection of the police.

They are as well known to the Chinamen as they are to the officers of
the law, and the visitor is always safe in following wherever they may
lead.

The tenement houses in the poorer sections of any great city are a
disgrace to modern civilization, but a Chinese tenement house is as much
worse than any of these as can be imagined. In one section of the
Chinese quarter at San Francisco is a four-story building above ground,
with a double basement below, one being under the other, and with an
open court extending from the lower basement clear to the roof. In this
building, which is jocularly styled by the guides, "The Palace Hotel of
the Chinese quarter," and in which a hundred Americans would find
difficulty in existing, over a thousand Chinamen live, sleep and eat,
all of the cooking being done on a couple of giant ranges in the
basement, which is divided up into shops, opium dens and sleeping
quarters.

In these shops are some clever artisans in brass and ivory, and the
locks that are turned out by hand by some of these brass-workers, and
made to a great extent on the same principles as the celebrated locks
made in this country by the Yale Company, are marvels of workmanship in
all of their parts, the joints being as neatly filled in as though
turned out by the latest improved machinery, the wonder of it all being
that the principles upon which they were made have been known to the
Chinese for thousands of years, the Yale locks being apparently nothing
but a slight improvement on the original John Chinaman ideas.

In the opium dens o