The custom of binding and destroying the feet, no doubt, arose from the low views entained by Chinese sages concerning woman, and from a lack of confidence in her sense of honour and virtue.  She must be maimed so that she cannot go about at will, so she shall be completely under the eye of her husband, held as it were in fetters.  It is a sad comment on Chinese domestic morality, it fosters the very evil it seeks to cure, it destroys all home life in the best sense.  The veiled women of the East are very much in the same position.  If a stranger, out of curiosity or by accident, look on the face of a Mohammedan wife, it might lead to her repudiation by her jealous husband, or the offender might be punished for his innocent glance.  The writer recalls how at Hebron, in Palestine, he was cautioned by the dragoman, when going up a narrow street to the Mosque of Machpelah, where he had to pass veiled women, not to look at them or to seem to notice them, as the men were very fanatical and might do violence to an unwary tourist.  The Chinese women of small feet, or rather no feet at all, walk, or attempt to walk, in a peculiar way.  It is as if one were on stilts.  The feet are nothing but stumps, while the ankles are large, almost unnatural in their development.  It is indeed a great deformity.  The feet are shrunken to less size than an infant’s; but they have not the beauty of a baby’s feet, which have in them great possibilities and a world of suggestion and romance and poetry.  If the Chinese custom had prevailed among the ancient Hebrew people, think you that King Solomon in singing of the graces of the Shulamite, who represents the Church mystically, would ever have exclaimed,—­“How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter!” We should have lost, moreover, much that is noble in art, and the poetic creations of Greek sculptors would never have delighted the eye nor enchained the fancy.

In our perambulations about Chinatown, we must next visit an opium-joint.  This mysterious place was situated in a long, rambling building through which we had to move cautiously so as not to stumble into some pit or dangerous hole or trap-door.  Here were no electric lights to drive away the gloom, here no gas-jets to show us where we were treading, nothing but an occasional lamp dimly burning.  Yet we went on as if drawn by a magic spell.  At last we were ushered into a room poorly furnished.  It was not more than twelve feet square, and in the corner was an apology for a bed.  On this was stretched an old man whose face was sunken, whose eyes were lusterless, whose hand was long and thin and bony, and whose voice was attenuated and pitched in a falsetto key.  The guide said that this old Chinaman was sixty-eight years of age, and that he had had a life of varied experience.  He was a miner by profession, but had spent all his earnings long ago, and was now an object of charity as well as of pity.  Indeed he was the very embodiment of misery, a wretched,