Me, that was never a quiet sleeper?
May be still I am but half dead;
Then I cannot be wholly dumb;
I will cry to the steps above my head,
And somebody, surely, some kind heart, will come,
To bury me, bury me,
Deeper, ever so little deeper.”
I wonder if there was ever a Tennyson of Celestial literature, and if he ever read anything like the above, and recalled it to mind, as he lay cowering and grovelling through the long hours of the dreary night, in the depths of this living tomb!
Out on the street once more, and we lost our guide, who was called off by a loud whistling for aid, from some other officer over on the Barbary Coast. My companions fell in with a Chinese merchant with whom they were acquainted, and we went with him to his store on Dupont Street. He gave us some scalding hot black tea in little China cups, and offered to help us in any way he could. O, yes, of course he was acquainted with the location of many “opium houses;” the Chinese quarter is full of them! Opium smoking is the great curse of China, and four fifths of the Chinese in San Francisco indulge in it to a greater or less extent. Some use it merely as a sedative, and in moderate quantities. Others use it as commonly as American tobacco chewers use the nicotian weed, consuming a dollar and a quarter’s worth every day, and being more or less under the influence of it all the time. The poorer class of opium smokers patronize the opium lodging-houses, where they frequently sleep all night, paying fifteen cents for a few grains of prepared opium and a raised couch to lie on, while inhaling the smoke and sleeping off its effects.
EFFECT AND EXTENT OF OPIUM SMOKING.