ran thus:--

"The pleasure of your company is requested at No. -- Sacramento Street,
on Friday evening at eight o'clock. A cup of tea at nine,--sharp.

"HOP SING."

This explained all. It meant a visit to Hop Sing's warehouse, the
opening and exhibition of some rare Chinese novelties and curios, a chat
in the back office, a cup of tea of a perfection unknown beyond these
sacred precincts, cigars, and a visit to the Chinese theatre or temple.
This was, in fact, the favorite programme of Hop Sing when he exercised
his functions of hospitality as the chief factor or superintendent of
the Ning Foo Company.

At eight o'clock on Friday evening, I entered the warehouse of Hop Sing.
There was that deliciously commingled mysterious foreign odor that I had
so often noticed; there was the old array of uncouth-looking objects,
the long procession of jars and crockery, the same singular blending of
the grotesque and the mathematically neat and exact, the same endless
suggestions of frivolity and fragility, the same want of harmony in
colors, that were each, in themselves, beautiful and rare. Kites in the
shape of enormous dragons and gigantic butterflies; kites so ingeniously
arranged as to utter at intervals, when facing the wind, the cry of a
hawk; kites so large as to be beyond any boy's power of restraint,--so
large that you understood why kite-flying in China was an amusement for
adults; gods of china and bronze so gratuitously ugly as to be beyond
any human interest or sympathy from their very impossibility; jars of
sweetmeats covered all over with moral sentiments from Confucius; hats
that looked like baskets, and baskets that looked like hats; silks so
light that I hesitate to record the incredible number of square yards
that you might pass through the ring on your little finger,--these, and
a great many other indescribable objects, were all familiar to me. I
pushed my way through the dimly-lighted warehouse, until I reached the
back office, or parlor, where I found Hop Sing waiting to receive me.

Before I describe him, I want the average reader to discharge from
his mind any idea of a Chinaman that he may have gathered from the
pantomime. He did not wear beautifully scalloped drawers fringed with
little bells (I never met a Chinaman who did); he did not habitually
carry his forefinger extended before him at right angles with his body;
nor did I ever hear him utter the mysterious sentence, "Ching a ring
a ring chaw