t angles and running from the heart of
the town down to the edge of the harbor is the street of the
prostitutes. It is easy to recognize the houses of ill-fame by their
scarlet blinds and by the scarlet numbers over their doors. Should you
stroll down the street during the day you will find the sullen-eyed
inmates seated in the doorways, brushing their long and lustrous
blue-black hair or painting their faces in white and vermillion
preparatory to the evening's entertainment. Probably four-fifths of
the _filles de joie_ in Sandakan are Chinese, the others are products
of Nippon--quaint, dainty, doll-like little women with faces so heavily
enameled that they would be cracked by a smile. When a Chinese merchant
wants a wife he usually visits a house of prostitution, selects one of
the inmates, drives a hard bargain with the hard-eyed mistress of the
establishment, and, the transaction concluded, brusquely tells the girl
to pack her belongings and accompany him to his home. I might add that
the girls thus chosen invariably make good wives and remain faithful to
their husbands.

[Illustration: The Jalan Tiga, Sandakan

A moderately broad thoroughfare, lined on both sides with
gambling-houses]

[Illustration: A patron of a Sandakan opium farm

Each smoker is provided with a lamp for heating his "pill" and a wooden
head-rest]

Running parallel to the Jalan Tiga is another street--I do not recall
its name--in which are the opium farms. Far from being veiled in
secrecy, they are operated as openly as American soda fountains. A
typical opium farm consists of a two-story wooden house, one of a long
row of similar buildings, containing a number of small, ill-lighted
rooms which reek with the sickly sweet fumes of the drug. The furniture
consists of a number of so-called beds, which in reality are wooden
platforms or tables, their tops, which are raised about three feet
above the floor, providing space on which two smokers can recline. Each
smoker is provided with a block of wood which serves as a pillow and a
small lamp for heating his "pill." The number of patrons who may be
accommodated at one time is prescribed by law and rigidly enforced,
signs denoting the authorized capacity of the house being posted at the
door, like the signs in elevators and on ferry-boats in America. For
example, the door of one farm that I visited bore the notice "Only
fifteen beds. Room for thirty persons." Over-crowding is forbidden by
the auth