is
suggested by the dusty, flashy streets and cosmopolitan crowd, also by
the fact that gambling saloons and even shops remain open all night, or
so long as customers are stirring, which is generally from supper until
breakfast-time, for at this season of perpetual daylight no one ever
seemed to go to bed. The sight of the principal street at four in the
morning, with music halls, restaurants, drinking and dancing saloons
blazing with electricity in the cold, grey light of a midnight sun was
both novel and unique. At this hour the night-houses were always
crowded, and you might re-visit them at midday and find the same
occupants still out of bed, drinking, smoking, and gambling, yet as
quiet and orderly in their demeanour as a company of Quakers. For,
notwithstanding its large percentage of the riff-raff element, crime is
very rare in Nome. I frequently visited the gambling saloons, where
gum-booted, mud-stained prospectors elbowed women in dainty Parisian
gowns and men in the conventional swallowtail, but I never once saw a
shot fired, nor even a dispute, although champagne flowed like water.
These places generally consisted of a spacious and gaudily decorated
hall with a drinking bar surrounded by various _roulette_, _crap_, and
_faro_ tables. The price of a drink admitted you to an adjoining music
hall, where I witnessed a variety entertainment that would scarcely have
passed the London County Council. But gambling was the chief attraction,
and it seemed to be fair, for cheating is clearly superfluous with three
zeros! Many of the frequenters of these night-houses appeared to be
foreigners, chiefly Swedes and Germans, and a few Frenchmen, and the
company was very mixed, Jews, Greeks, and Levantines being numerous
amongst the men, whilst the ladies were mostly flashily dressed birds
of passage from San Francisco, only here for a brief space before
flitting South, like the swallows, at the first fall of snow.

There was a delightfully free-and-easy, _laisser-aller_ air about
everybody and everything at Nome City, which would, perhaps, have jarred
upon an ultra-respectable mind. Most of the ladies at the Golden Gate
Hotel were located there in couples, unattended, permanently at any
rate, by male protectors. The bedroom adjoining mine was occupied by two
of these Californian _houris_, whose habits were apparently not framed
on Lucretian lines. For the manager appeared at my bedside early one
morning with a polite reques