Here little China flaunts her scarlet streamers overhead, and flanks her doors with legends in saffron and gold; even its window panes have a foreign look, and within is a glimmering of tinsel, a subdued light, and china lamps flickering before graven images of barbaric hideousness.  The air is laden with the fumes of smoking sandal-wood and strange odors of the East; and the streets, swarming with coolies, resound with the echoes of an unknown tongue.  There is hardly room for us to pass; we pick our way, and are sometimes curiously regarded by slant-eyed pagans, who bear us no good-will, if that shadow of scorn in the face has been rightly interpreted.  China is not more Chinese than this section of our Christian city, nor the heart of Tartary less American.

Turn which way we choose, within two blocks, on either hand we find nothing but the infinitely small and astonishingly numerous forms of traffic on which the hordes around us thrive.  No corner is too cramped for the squatting street cobbler; and as for the pipe cleaners, the cigarette rollers, the venders of sweetmeats and conserves, they gather on the curb or crouch under overhanging windows, and await custom with the philosophical resignation of the Oriental.

On Dupont Street, between Clay and Sacramento Streets—­a single block,—­there are no less than five basement apartments devoted exclusively to barbers.  There are hosts of this profession in the quarter.  Look down the steep steps leading into the basement and see, at any hour of the day, with what deft fingers the tonsorial operators manipulate the devoted pagan head.

There is no waste space in the quarter.  In apartments not more than fifteen feet square three or four different professions are often represented, and these afford employment to ten or a dozen men.  Here is a druggist and herb-seller, with huge spectacles on his nose, at the left of the main entrance; a butcher displays his meats in a show-window on the right, serving his customers over the sill; a clothier is in the rear of the shop, while a balcony filled with tailors or cigar-makers hangs half-way to the ceiling.

[Illustration:  “China is Not More Chinese than this Section of Our Christian City.”]

Close about us there are over one hundred and fifty mercantile establishments and numerous mechanical industries.  The seventy-five cigar factories employ eight thousand coolies, and these are huddled into the closest quarters.  In a single room, measuring twenty feet by thirty feet, sixty men and boys have been discovered industriously rolling real Havanas.

The traffic which itinerant fish and vegetable venders drive in every part of the city must be great, being as it is an extreme convenience for lazy or thrifty housewives.  A few of these basket men cultivate gardens in the suburbs, but the majority seek their supplies in the city markets.  Wash-houses have been established in every part of the city, and are supplied with two sets of laborers, who spend watch and watch on duty, so that the establishment is never closed.