In another house there were five hundred and fifty people lodged in seventy-five rooms.  Possibly the owners of tenement houses in our large cities, who crowd men and women into a narrow space and through unpitying agents reap a rich harvest regardless of the sufferings of their fellow-beings, have been taking lessons from the landlords of Chinatown.  I said to myself, as I went to and fro through these narrow passages, dimly lighted with a lamp, and the lights were few and far between, if a fire should break out, at midnight, when all are wrapt in slumber, what a holocaust would be here!  And whose would the sin and the shame be?  There are good and ample fire-appliances for the protection of the city, but the poor Chinamen hemmed in, as in a dark prison-house, would surely be suffocated by smoke or be consumed in the flames.  When the old theatre was burned down, twenty-five men, and probably more, perished, although there were means of escape from this building.  I was told that the wood from which the largest hotel in Chinatown, its Palace hotel so to speak, was constructed in the early days, was brought around Cape Horn, and cost $350 per thousand feet.  This was before saw-mills were erected in the forests among the foothills and on the slopes of the Sierras.  The kitchen of the big boarding house was a novelty.  It was nothing in any respect like the well-appointed kitchens of our hotels with their great ranges and open fire-places where meats may be roasted slowly on the turnspit.  On one side of the kitchen there was a kind of stone-parapet about two feet and a half high, and on the top of this there were eight fire-places.  As the Chinamen cook their own food there might be as many as eight men here at one time.  I asked the guide if they ever quarreled.  His answer was significant.  “No! and it would be difficult to bring eight men of any other nationality together in such close proximity without differences arising and contentions taking place; but the Chinamen never trouble each other.”  There was only one man cooking at such a late hour as that in which we visited the kitchen, about half-past ten o’clock at night.  He used charcoal, and as the coals were fanned the fire looked like that of a forge in a blacksmith’s shop.

On our way to the Chinese Restaurant we stepped into a goldsmith’s shop.  There were a few customers present, and the proprietor waited on them with great diligence.  At benches like writing desks, on which were tools of various descriptions, were seated some half a dozen workmen who were busily engaged.  They never looked up while we stood by and examined their work, which was of a high order.  The filagree-work was beautiful and artistic.  There were numerous personal ornaments, some of solid gold, others plaited.  The bracelets which they were making might fittingly adorn the neck of a queen.  I learned that these skilled men worked sixteen hours a day on moderate wages.  Their work went into first-class Chinese bric-a-brac stores and into the jewelry stores of the merchants who supply the rich and cultured with their ornaments.