were the dregs of the city's cesspools, wretches who hid at
night in the rain-soaked cellars of old ramshackle tene~
ments, in "stale-beer dives" and opium joints, with aban~
doned women in the last stages of the harlot's progress --
women who had been kept by Chinamen and turned away
at last to die. Every day the police net would drag hun~
dreds of them off the streets, and in the Detention Hospi~
tal you might see them, herded together in a miniature
inferno, with hideous, beastly faces, bloated and leprous
with disease, laughing, shouting, screaming in all stages
of drunkenness, barking like dogs, gibbering like apes,
raving and tearing themselves in delirium.

[[276]]

p275 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p276w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p277

v?