Page:James Hudson Maurer - The Far East (1912).pdf/16

 his selfish vice, as to keep himself alive. He becomes frantic for opium. He will sell anything he has to buy the stuff. His moral sense is destroyed. A diseased, decrepit, insane being, he forgets even his family. He sells his bric-a-brac, his pictures, his furniture. He sells his daughters, even his wife if she has attractions as slaves to rich men. He tears his house to pieces, sells the tiles off his roof, the bricks off his walls, the wood-work about his doors and windows. He cuts down the trees in his yard and sells the wood, and at last he crawls out on the highway, digs himself a cave (if he has strength enough) and prostrates himself before the camel and donkey drivers, whining, chattering, praying that a few coppers be thrown to him.

An opium den usually takes up one floor of a building. Against the walls is a continuous wooden platform, perhaps two feet high and extending out seven or eight feet into the room. This platform is divided at intervals of five or six feet by partitions. Each compartment accomodates two smokers, with one lamp between them. Sometimes a rug or a bit of matting is laid on the hard couch—sometimes not—for the Chinaman accustomed to sleeping on bricks prefers his couch hard.

A man always lies down to smoke opium, for the porous pill, which is pressed into the tiny orifice of the pipe, cannot be ignited, but is held directly over the lamp and the flame drawn up through it.

The keeper of the den sits behind a table or desk, on which is a litter of pipes and thimble-like cups; an attendant keeps moving about the room with fresh supplies of the drug. For each thimbleful, enough for one or two smokes, the price varies (according to quality) from ten cents up (Mexican money).

How may thousands of these vile, disease-breeding dens there are in China no one knows.

Their grade and style varies nearly as much as do their numbers—from a handsomely furnished and clean den, where the genuine is sold, down to the low, vicious resorts maintained fer the purpose of catering to a degrading habit, where a mixture cf some kind of poison is sold at the rate of two pipes for three cents.

In this small work the reader can hope for little more than a mere glimpse of the disaster that opium brought upon China.

Volumes could be written depicting the destruction and misery caused by the drug, and still leave untold