After supper we leaned from the high balcony, among flowers and lanterns, and looked down upon the street below; it was midnight, yet the pavements were not deserted, and there arose to our ears a murmur as of a myriad humming bees shut in clustering hives; close about us were housed near twenty thousand souls; shops were open; discordant orchestras resounded from the theaters; in a dark passage we saw the flames playing upon the thresholds of infamy to expel the evil shades.
Away off in the Bay in the moonlight glimmered the ribbed sail of a fishing-junk, and the air was heavy with an indefinable odor which to this hour puzzles me; but it must be attributed either to sink or sandalwood—perchance to both!
"It is a little bit of old China, this quarter of ours," said the artist, rising to go. And so it is, saving only a noticeable lack of dwarfed trees and pale pagodas and sprays of willowy bamboo; of clumsy boats adrift on tideless streams; of toy-like tea-gardens hanging among artificial rocks, and of troops of flat-faced but complaisant people posing grotesquely in ridiculous perspective.