the business section, nm brokers' traps race around to the annoyance and danger of a long-suffering public as they do in Shanghai power great show of haste, the puller in front and the pushers beamd yelling @ staccato "Hil Hit" to clear the way for his imperious and never-to-be-delayed highness, the broker. Evidently these' man-chariots are as much a nuisance as the brokers' traps in Shanghai, for it was only the other day that some one wrote to the papers regarding the "obstruction and nuisance and great danger to the, pedestrian" by the brokers of Ice House Street.
Tee House Street, the local Rialto, is the converging point of all gossip and the latest mews, and to the query as to whether Cements have "hardened," friend broker buttonholes you for a confab on 17 other topics.
Hongkong is very British, naturally, but the Cantonese el ment obtrudes and predominates. Public open spaces may be entered feature might have much to recommend itself, especially to pedestrians, although the loss of light and free air circulation to the buildings themselves would still be apparent. In Hongkong, with its confined area and narrow streets, this shutting in of" the sidewalks and upper stories mokes the shop fronts dark and stuffy looking; and in the ters especially, some atmosphere pervades. One would not hesitate to suggest that the periodical epidemics from which the Colony suffers might be traced to the unhealthy conditions resulting from this obtruding of verandahs over the front of buildings which are already unhygienic from terrible overcrowding.
Owing to the limited space for building, shops and dwellings are of three, four and five storeys, even in the narrow streets which ascend the hillside at right angles 'The architecture here is of a deadly monotony: stucco facings, with pealing paint of heterogeneous colours, and everywhere the be: like open verandahs, in which the family washing is festooned and all' manner of odds and ends accumulated, the whole presenting a most untidy picture.
streets which ascend the at right angles, some are tar macadam finish, some of flat corrugati for foothold, stretches of' macadam flights of stone steps, and still others consisting of tiers of stone steps, like Ladder Street, which, in an almost straight line, runs pic turesqadly by a series of some 20 Mghts of stairs from Queen's Road near the water front right up to Seymour Road on the middle levels, about 160 feet above vou
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.