ly as the American Fourth of July. The
Italians have their dear domestic quarter, with Italian caricatures in
the windows, Chianti and polenta in the taverns. The Chinese are settled
as in China. The goods they offer for sale are as foreign as the
lettering on the signboard of the shop: dried fish from the China seas;
pale cakes and sweetmeats--the like, perhaps, once eaten by
Badroubadour; nuts of unfriendly shape; ambiguous, outlandish
vegetables, misshapen, lean, or bulbous--telling of a country where the
trees are not as our trees, and the very back-garden is a cabinet of
curiosities. The joss-house is hard by, heavy with incense, packed with
quaint carvings and the paraphernalia of a foreign ceremonial. All these
you behold, crowded together in the narrower arteries of the city, cool,
sunless, a little mouldy, with the unfamiliar faces at your elbow, and
the high, musical sing-song of that alien language in your ears. Yet the
houses are of Occidental build; the lines of a hundred telegraphs pass,
thick as a ship's rigging, overhead, a kite hanging among them, perhaps,
or perhaps two, one European, one Chinese, in shape and colour;
mercantile Jack, the Italian fisher, the Dutch merchant, the Mexican
vaquero, go hustling by; at the sunny end of the street, a thoroughfare
roars with European traffic; and meanwhile, high and clear, out breaks
perhaps the San Francisco fire-alarm, and people pause to count the
strokes, and in the stations of the double fire-service you know that
the electric bells are ringing, the traps opening, and clapping to, and
the engine, manned and harnessed, being whisked into the street, before
the sound of the alarm has ceased to vibrate on your ear. Of all
romantic places for a boy to loiter in, that Chinese quarter is the most
romantic. There, on a half-holiday, three doors from home, he may visit
an actual foreign land, foreign in people, language, things, and
customs. The very barber of the Arabian Nights shall be at work before
him, shaving heads; he shall see Aladdin playing on the streets; who
knows but among those nameless vegetables the fruit of the nose-tree
itself may be exposed for sale? And the interest is heightened with a
chill of horror. Below, you hear, the cellars are alive with mystery;
opium dens, where the smokers lie one above another, shelf above shelf,
close-packed and grovelling in deadly stupor; the seats of unknown vices
and cruelties, the prisons of unacknowledged sla