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A house lot of the better kind will cover a site two hundred feet square, or a hundred feet upon the the street, with a depth back of two or three hundred feet, more or less. Within these outlines, you will see a variety of courts, halls, corridors, tanks, &c., and perhaps a part, one third or one fourth of the space shut up by a high and massive wall, like those of a nunnery. Sometimes, as in the case of the pawn-broker's establishments, the massive wall encircles the whole plot of ground, and rises twenty five or thirty feet in hight. This high wall is intended to serve as a protection not only, nor so much against robbers, as a safeguard against fire, (there being here no Insurance offices) and is so constructed that the enclosed build- ings cannot easily be set on fire from without, all the entrances be- ing made secure by having the doors plated with tile. These high walls stand independently of the main buildings within, or serve only in part for the same, as they are raised subsequently, and are con structed like all the others which have no surrounding walls.
Compared with what is modern European, or what is to be found in all modern Christendom, in every quarter of the globe where Christian civilization has reached, the streets and the buildings of a Chinese city present most striking contrasts. When Victoria town, or whatever they may please to call that quarter of Shanghái which has been assigned to Europeans shall have had a few years growth and become matured in its houses and streets, these contrasts will be very conspicuous, and cannot fail to make an impression on the most prejudiced minds. In one place you see what is Christian, in the other what is pagan. Instead of spacious, clean and airy streets, as seen in London, Liverpool, or Paris, you have the most miserable substitutes, narrow, filthy and close, to a degree that cannot adequately be conceived of, from any description. They must be s ́en in order to be fully known. The contrast in the houses is not less remarkable. A few there are, spacious, neat, and com- fortable, and would be so esteemed by any people. But the great majority, say nine tenths of the whole, are such as few Europeans would like to inhabit. They are low, damp and dark, and so con- tracted and close, as to be both very hot and very unhealthy. In summer they are poorly ventilated, and in winter equally unfitted to render their inmates comfortable. One might suppose that many of the arrangements were designed to set at defiance all attempts to secure health or comfort. The order of things, in their construc- tion, is the European reversed. Instead of having a dwelling two or three stories high, light, dry, and well ventilated in summer and
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