oofs, there is neither
nook nor corner but is populous with Mongolians of the lowest caste. The
better class have their reserved quarters; with them there is at least
room to stretch one's legs without barking the shins of one's neighbor;
but from this comparative comfort to the condensed discomfort of the
impoverished coolie, how sudden and great the change!

Between brick walls we thread our way, and begin descending into the
abysmal darkness; the tapers, without which it were impossible to
proceed with safety, burn feebly in the double night of the subterranean
tenements. Most of the habitable quarters under the ground are like so
many pigeon-houses indiscriminately heaped together. If there were only
sunshine enough to drink up the slime that glosses every plank, and
fresh air enough to sweeten the mildewed kennels, this highly eccentric
style of architecture might charm for a time, by reason of its novelty;
there is, moreover, a suspicion of the picturesque lurking about the
place--but, heaven save us, how it smells!

We pass from one black hole to another. In the first there is a kind of
bin for ashes and coals, and there are pots and grills lying about--it
is the kitchen. A heap of fire kindling-wood in one corner, a bench or
stool as black as soot can paint it, a few bowls, a few bits of rags, a
few fragments of food, and a coolie squatting over a struggling fire, a
coolie who rises out of the dim smoke like the evil genii in the Arabian
tale. There is no chimney, there is no window, there is no drainage. We
are in a cubic sink, where we can scarcely stand erect. From the small
door pours a dense volume of smoke, some of it stale smoke, which our
entry has forced out of the corners; the kitchen will only hold so much
smoke, and we have made havoc among the cubic inches. Underfoot, the
thin planks sag into standing pools, and there is a glimmer of poisonous
blue just along the base of the blackened walls; thousands feed daily in
troughs like these!

The next apartment, smaller yet, and blacker and bluer, and more
slippery and slimy, is an uncovered cesspool, from which a sickening
stench exhales continually. All about it are chambers--very small
ones,--state-rooms let me call them, opening upon narrow galleries that
run in various directions, sometimes bridging one another in a marvelous
and exceedingly ingenious economy of space. The majority of these
state-rooms are just long enough to lie down in, and just b