Celestials were betting themselves poor at the game of "Tan," or in the restaurants where others were dining convivially. It was a glorious moonlight night, such as one rarely sees, save on the Pacific coast, or in the tropics. The whole air was loaded with the fumes of burning "joss sticks," or incense candles, made from powdered sandal wood, fragrant gums, etc., the blue smoke of which rose from every doorway, open window, crack, crevice, or cranny in the houses where the blue-bloused sons of China congregate, resting on the Chinese quarter like a fog on a Jersey salt-marsh, or a cloud of mosquitoes on a Mississippi river-bottom. While we were standing there, a party of Chinese boys placed a row of these little joss-sticks upright along the edge of the gutter by the sidewalk, leading-down to the centre of the block northwards, and set them all burning-at once. As the cloud of fragrant smoke rose up from them, a well-dressed Chinaman appeared and directed a servant where to place a large tray, or salver, on which was neatly arranged a hot lunch, prepared in the most attractive style of the first-class Chinese culinary artist. The lunch being duly arranged on the edge of the side-walk, he kneeled before it, chin-chinned repeatedly until his forehead nearly touched the curbstone, and then, to avoid the curious and irreverent throng of Caucasians, who were fast gathering about him, arose and hustled away the lunch into the house from which he came. A huge mass of curiously curled, and twisted, and convoluted, and cornuted—and I don't know what not else—tissue paper, forming some em-
