Chinatown.—­Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip through our Chinese quarter the other night.  The Chinese have built their portion of the city to suit themselves; and as they keep neither carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a general thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles.  At ten o’clock at night the Chinaman may be seen in all his glory.  In every little cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning Josh-lights and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow, long-tailed vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short truckle-bed, smoking opium, motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned inward from excess of satisfaction—­or rather the recent smoker looks thus, immediately after having passed the pipe to his neighbor—­for opium-smoking is a comfortless operation, and requires constant attention.  A lamp sits on the bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker’s mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a hole with putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to smoke—­and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the stem would well-nigh turn the stomach of a statue.  John likes it, though; it soothes him, he takes about two dozen whiffs, and then rolls over to dream, Heaven only knows what, for we could not imagine by looking at the soggy creature.  Possibly in his visions he travels far away from the gross world and his regular washing, and feast on succulent rats and birds’-nests in Paradise.

Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No. 13 Wang street.  He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest way.  He had various kinds of colored and colorless wines and brandies, with unpronouncable names, imported from China in little crockery jugs, and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash-basins of porcelain.  He offered us a mess of birds’-nests; also, small, neat sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse, and therefore refrained.  Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand articles of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of, and beyond our ability to describe.

His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the former were split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from China in that shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste which kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage.

We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chow-chow street, making up a lottery scheme—­in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the same way in various parts of the quarter, for about every third Chinaman runs a lottery, and the balance of the tribe “buck” at it.  “Tom,” who speaks faultless English, and used to be chief and only cook to the Territorial Enterprise, when the establishment kept bachelor’s hall two years ago, said that “Sometime Chinaman buy ticket one dollar hap, ketch um two tree hundred, sometime no ketch um anything; lottery like one man fight um seventy—­may-be he whip, may-be he get whip heself, welly good.”