took great pains to explain to me that his wearing no pigtail was attributable, not to his own act and deed, but to the fact that that ornament had been cut off by some person or persons unknown, when he was either drunk or asleep—I could not quite make out which. The deadliest insult which can be offered a Chinaman (so I understood him) is to cut off his pigtail, and it was only when referring to this incident, and to his desire to wreak a terrible vengeance upon the perpetrators, that there was any cessation of his embarrassing smile. The thought of the insult to which he had been subjected, and of his consequent degradation in the eyes of his countrymen, brought so evil a look upon his parchment-coloured features, and caused his small and cunning eyes to twist and turn so horribly, that I was glad to turn the conversation to pleasanter topics, even though it necessitated my being once more fixed by that bland and penetrating smile so peculiarly his own. The smile became more rigid than ever, when I informed him that I was anxious to smoke a pipe of opium. The way in which he turned his face upon me (including the smile, which enveloped and illumined me in its rays) was, for all the world, like the turning-on by a policeman of a bull's-eye lantern. With a final grin which threatened to distort permanently his features, he bade us follow him, and led the way up the most villainously treacherous staircase which it has ever been my lot to ascend.
A villainous staircase.
"Den" was an appropriate name for the reeking hole to which he conducted us. It was dirty and dark, being lit only by a smoking lamp on the mantel-shelf, and was not much larger than a full-sized cupboard. The walls, which were of a dingy yellow (not unlike the "whites" of the smokers' eyes) were quite bare, with the exception of the one facing the door, on which, incongruously enough, was plastered a coarsely-coloured and hideous print of the crucifixion. The furniture consisted of three raised mattresses, with small tables on which were placed pipes, lamps, and opium.
Huddled or curled up on these mattresses lay two wretched smokers—one of them with the whites, or, I should say, "yellows," of his eyes turned up the ceiling, and another, whose slumbers we had apparently disturbed, staring about him with a dazed and stupefied air. Something in the look of these men—either the ghastly pallor of their complexion, or the listlessness of their bearing—reminded me not a little of the "white lepers" of Norway. I have seen patients in the hospitals there whose general aspect greatly resembled that of these men, although the skin of the white leper has more or a milky appearance—as if it had been bleached, in fact—than that of the opium-smoker, which is dirtier and more yellow. The remaining occupants of the den, two of whom were Chinamen, were wide awake. The third
