This text is part of:
[265]
Ki Wgok using his shelf for twelve hours, and giving it up to LI Ho for the other twelve hours. In some rooms three sets of lodgers occupy the shelves each twenty-four hours-eight hours a-piece.
Yet those who lodge in this hotel live in a light and roomy palace by the side of those who live in the labyrinth of courts and styes, yards and entries, lying round Bartlett Alley.
Here some of the first White settlers in San Francisco threw up their hives.
The ground is undrained.
The log shanties were run up hastily and cheaply; and in these fever-haunted hovels, rotten with age, putrid with filth, overrun with vermin, the masses of Mongolians make their home.
They creep into vaults, they climb into eaves, they burrow in the earth.
In holes unfit for dogs, you may discover ten or twelve wasted creatures, sprawling on shelves, staring into space, and trying to smoke themselves into the opium-dreamer's paradise.
Worse still, if in the “ lowest depth” there can be a “ deeper still,” is the thieves' quarter ; a district running in and out of more respectable quarters with a rare indifference as to social forms.
In the thieves' quarter it is well to have a guide and escort,
1875.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.