a quantity of valuable goods just taken from a grocery store on Pacific street, which the defeated party had broken open and plundered. (This occurred just as related quite recently; the two survivors are now in the State Prison—one of them with a wooden leg—and the, officer is still on the police force.)
The excitement being over, the officer conducts us through a narrow alley swarming with Chinese prostitutes, and reeking with a thousand separate stinks, each more abominable than the other, to see what he designates as a "Chinese Hoo-doo House." In a back room, hidden entirely from the gaze of passers in the alley, we find a crowd of the lowest class of Chinese, who are enjoying themselves in various ways. There is an altar at one end of the room, with a Joss, in gorgeous vermilion and blue, sitting erect at the back. His face bears the same expression of conscious power, rest, and complete self-satisfaction which is seen on that of his more aristocratic brother in the Buddhist temples on Dupont and Pine streets, and he holds the fingers of his uplifted hand in the same mysteriously significant position. But instead of rich satin garments and costly hangings of crimson silk and wonderful gilt filigree work, he is clad in tawdry cotton-stuffs and surrounded by hangings of trifling value. The altar-ornaments are porcelain instead of bronze metal, and the meat-offerings before him are not such as would tempt the appetite of a well-regulated and healthy immortal, while the incense which is burning under his nose is redolent of tobacco and garlic rather than of sandal- wood and the costly
