These haunts are seldom visited by the officers of justice, for it is almost impossible to storm the barriers in season to catch the criminals in the very act.  To-day you approach a gambling hell by this door, to-morrow the inner passages of the house are mysteriously changed, and it is impossible to track them without being frequently misled; meanwhile the alarm is sounded throughout the building, and very speedily every trace of guilt has disappeared.  The lottery is another popular temptation in the quarter.  Most of the very numerous wash-houses are said to be private agencies for the sale of lottery tickets.  Put your money, no matter how little it is, on certain of the characters that cover a small sheet of paper, and your fate is soon decided; for there is a drawing twice a day.

Enter any one of the pawn-shops licensed by the city authorities, and cast your eye over the motley collection of unredeemed articles.  There are pistols of every pattern and almost of every age, the majority of them loaded.  There are daggers in infinite variety, including the ingenious fan stiletto, which, when sheathed, may be carried in the hand without arousing suspicion; for the sheath and handle bear; an exact resemblance to a closed fan.  There are entire suits of clothes, beds and bedding, tea, sugar, clocks—­multitudes of them, a clock being one of the Chinese hobbies, and no room is completely furnished without at least a pair of them,—­ornaments in profusion; everything, in fact, save only the precious queue, without which no Chinaman may hope for honor in this life or salvation in the next.

The throngs of customers that keep the pawn-shops crowded with pledges are probably most of them victims of the gambling table or the opium den.  They come from every house that employs them; your domestic is impatient of delay, and hastens through his daily task in order that he may nightly indulge his darling sin.

The opium habit prevails to an alarming extent throughout the country, but no race is so dependent on this seductive and fatal stimulant as the Chinese.  There are several hundred dens in San Francisco where, for a very moderate sum, the coolie may repair, and revel in dreams that end in a deathlike sleep.

Let us pause at the entrance of one of these pleasure-houses.  Through devious ways we follow the leader, and come at last to a cavernous retreat.  The odors that salute us are offensive; on every hand there is an accumulation of filth that should naturally, if it does not, breed fever and death.  Forms press about us in the darkness,—­forms that hasten like shadows toward that den of shades.  We enter by a small door that is open for a moment only, and find ourselves in an apartment about fifteen feet square.  We can touch the ceiling on tiptoe, yet there are three tiers of bunks placed with head boards to the wall, and each bunk just broad enough for two occupants.  It is like the steerage in an emigrant vessel, eminently shipshape.  Every bunk is filled; some of the smokers have had their dream and lie in grotesque attitudes, insensible, ashen-pale, having the look of plague-stricken corpses.