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SOME CHINESE EPISODES.

the tenements to open with axe, or bar, or sledge an aperture through which to fire, it was done. For three hours this continued at sickening length. At last the doors of the charnel-house were broken open and a sea of horror, shrouded by the dismal night, rolled stifling over the senses. Sprawding in their gore, crouching in corners, and under banks were the mangled forms of moaning men, and women, and children upon whom this terrible destruction had come thus suddenly. Little respite the rabble gave them. Dragging from their, hiding places the trembling inmates, one by one they brought them to the door, where others halted and hurried them to execution. A cluster of three were hagred to the end of a gutter-spout overhanging a corridor; other three were dangled from the edge of an awning; four were strangled at the sides of a wagon: four were taken to the gateway where the first was executed and suspended from the same beam. When the rooms were emptied of their living occupants, the bodies of three who had been shot to death remained, and many others wounded. Of those hanged one was a mere child, and children assisted at the execution. "Most of the whites engaged in the hanging," writes an eyewitness to the San Francisco Bulletin, "were men of Hibernian extraction, men in whose countenance you could easily distinguish the brute nature that controlled all their actions, but none of that face divine we are so often delighted in looking upon. And these men had all their brutal passions wrought to the highest pitch. But were any stronger evidence necessary of the utter demoralization of this mob than that already adduced, we find it in the fact that the city gamins were sprigs of humanity not yet having entered their teens, and alas! women participated in the night's hellish proceedings. Instances of both actually came under my own observation. At the place of execution on Los Angeles street, a little urchin, not over ten years old, stood on the top of