ell of unsavory food, the stench of
open gutters. This panorama of naked bodies, of wild-eyed yellow faces
drawn with fatigue and heat passes before ones' eyes for an hour. Then
the senses begin to reel and it is time to leave this scene of Oriental
life that is far lower and more repulsive than the most crowded streets
in the terrible East Side tenement quarter of New York on a midsummer
night.

Hongkong, both in the European and native quarters, is built to endure
for centuries. Most of the houses are of granite or plastered brick. The
streets are paved with granite slabs. Even the private residences have
massive walls and heavy roofs of red or black tile; the gardens are
screened from the street by high walls, with broken glass worked into
the mortar that forms the coping and with tall iron entrance gates.
These residences dot the side hill above the town. They are built upon
terraces, which include the family tennis court. The roads wind around
the mountainside, many of them quarried out of solid rock. All the
building material of these houses had to be carried up the steep
mountainside by coolies and, until the cable railway was finished, the
dwellers were borne to their homes at night by chair coolies.

This cable railway carries one nearly to the top of the peak back of
Hongkong, and from the station a short walk brings one to the summit,
where a wireless station is used to flash arrivals of vessels to the
city below. The view from this summit, and from the splendid winding
road which leads to the Peak Hospital, not far away, is one of the
finest in the world. The harbor, dotted with many ships and small boats,
the indented coast for a score of miles, the bare and forbidding Chinese
territory across the bay, the big city at the foot of the hill; all
these are spread out below like a great panorama.

The British are firmly entrenched at Hongkong. Not only have they actual
ownership of Victoria Island, on which Hongkong is built, but they have
a perpetual lease of a strip of the mainland across from the island,
extending back for over one hundred miles. The native city across the
bay is Kowloon, and is reached by a short ride on the new railroad
which will eventually connect Hankow with Paris. On the barren shore,
about a mile from Hongkong, has been founded the European settlement of
Kowloon City. It comprises a row of large warehouses, or godowns, a big
naval victualling station and coaling depot, large barrack