A CHINAMAN AMD HIS WIFE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 658, 8 April 1914, Page 7

A CHINAMAN AMD HIS WIFE.

THE LIFE OF OPIUM. I once spent a night with a detective in visiting China Town in NewYork : and there, in a little lighted spot in that crowded and roaring piece of rock that swarms with the jnost unmysterious people in the world, I felt as though I were moving in a dream or visiting another planet. Night everywhere else in the great city, it was lull day there. In the l'ight of sunny lamps one walked through alleys hung with paper lanterns, by little streets of houses where not a soul could speak a word of English or think an English thought. We went into great lighted shops crowded with articles not one of which would be of any use to an European.

We visited opium dens where there was another dreamland within the fairy scene in which we were walking, and theatres where not only the dialogue but even the pantomime and the facial cxpress'ions 1 were all inscrutable.

One room I remember visiting by special favour. It was at the top of a house, and exquisitely clean ; it contained a large bed, two or three chairs, and a bird cage. The air was heavy with the sweet smell of opium, and on the bed were sitting two of the most contented and" entirely satisfied people I have ever seen.

They were a Chinaman and his wife,, who had saved enough money to devote themselves exclusively to the only life that they deemed worth living—the life of opium. They knew neither clay nor night, and had, I think, no sense of time. They smoked a little, dreamed a little, ate a very little by turns and as they felt inclined ; but they hardly ever moved from the room, or indeed from the bed on which they reclined in dull bule silk garments, the lamp and pipe and opium-box between them. A man was paid to come every day and keep the room in the spotless condition in which we found it.

The canary sang loudly in his cage, although it was long past midnight; he, like his master, knew neither day nor night, and sang and slept and ate alternately. The man hardly spoke a word while we were there ; two or three sentences to the detective, and one or two to me ; and though I did not join in smoking the opium I felt rather than understood, gazing into his unfathomable eyes, that there might be an existence in that room of song and dreams much wider than many a one in the world outside.

The man had sold his soul for a few grains of opium, but he had also stripped himself of possessions, and simplified life to the one thing that he wanted ; • and I felt when I returned from the bright day of this pic-ture-book town to the night of Fifth Avenue, where the millionaires were slumbering uneasily in their rococc palaces, that he had got a bettei price for his soul than they. —Filsoc Voting, in the "Saturday Review."