e door-steps, with his pipe and lamp all going. I told
him to clear out. I asked him why he was there, and he told me he had
nowhere else to go, now that the smoking-dens were all closed, and that he
had to find some sheltered nook where he could have his smoke."

It was not the plan to close the opium sale shops; theoretically, it will
take nine or ten years to do that. But after closing all the places where
opium was smoked socially and publicly, it should become possible to
register all the individuals who buy the drug for home consumption. It was
the closing of the dens, the places for public smoking, in all the cities
of Shansi, which had the immediate effect of limiting the crop and the
manufacture of smoking instruments. The one hundred and twenty-nine dens
of T'ai Yuan-fu were all closed before I arrived there. In T'ai Yuan-fu,
as in Peking, you could buy an opium-smoker's outfit for next to nothing.
Cloisonne pipes, mounted with ivory and jade, were offered at absurd
prices.

One of the saddest features of the situation in Shansi is the activity of
the opium-cure fraud. The opium-smoking habit can be cured, once the
social element is eliminated, as easily as the morphine or cocaine
habits--more easily, some would claim. I do not mean to say that a
degraded, degenerate being can be made over, in a week, into a normal,
healthy being; but it does not seem to be very difficult to tide even the
confirmed smoker over the discomfort and danger that attend breaking off
the habit. In Shansi, as in all the opium provinces, "opium refuges" are
maintained by the various missions. The usual plan is to charge a small
fee for the medicines administered, in order to make the refuges
self-supporting. It takes a week or ten days to effect a cure by the
methods usually followed. The patient is confined to a room, less and less
opium is allowed from day to day, stimulants (either strychnine or
atropine) are administered, and local symptoms are treated as may seem
necessary to the physician in charge. Some of the missions at first took a
stand against the reduction method, believing that medical missionaries
should not administer opium in any form; but after a death or two they
accepted the inevitable compromise, recognizing that it is not safe to
shut down the supply too abruptly. But the number of these refuges is
pitifully small beside the extent of the evil. They have been at work for
a generation without bringing about any per