pieces
from every vase, sprinkle the guests with their pollen and large pink
petals, looking like bits of broken, opal-colored glass.

The sensational piece, reserved for the end, is a trio on the
'chamecen', long and monotonous, that the geishas perform as a rapid
pizzicato on the highest strings, very sharply struck. It sounds like
the very quintessence, the paraphrase, the exasperation, if I may so
call it, of the eternal buzz of insects, which issues from the trees,
old roofs, old walls, from everything in fact, and which is the
foundation of all Japanese sounds.

Half-past ten! The programme has been carried out, and the reception is
over. A last general tap! tap! tap! the little pipes are stowed away
in their chased sheaths, tied up in the sashes, and the mousmes rise to
depart.

They light, at the end of short sticks, a quantity of red, gray, or blue
lanterns, and after a series of endless bows and curtseys, the guests
disperse in the darkness of the lanes and trees.

We also go down to the town, Yves, Chrysantheme, Oyouki and I--in order
to conduct my mother-in-law, sisters-in-law, and my youthful aunt,
Madame Nenufar, to their house.

We wish to take one last stroll together in our old familiar
pleasure-haunts, to drink one more iced sherbet at the house of the
Indescribable Butterflies, buy one more lantern at Madame Tres-Propre's,
and eat some parting waffles at Madame L'Heure's!

I try to be affected, moved, by this leave-taking, but without success.
In regard to Japan, as with the little men and women who inhabit it,
there is something decidedly wanting; pleasant enough as a mere pastime,
it begets no feeling of attachment.

On our return, when I am once more with Yves and the two mousmes
climbing up the road to Diou-djen-dji, which I shall probably never see
again, a vague feeling of melancholy pervades my last stroll.

It is, however, but the melancholy inseparable from all things that are
about to end without possibility of return.

Moreover, this calm and splendid summer is also drawing to a close for
us-since to-morrow we shall go forth to meet the autumn, in Northern
China. I am beginning, alas! to count the youthful summers I may still
hope for; I feel more gloomy each time another fades away, and flies to
rejoin the others already disappeared in the dark and bottomless abyss,
where all past things lie buried.

At midnight we return home, and my removal begins; while on board the
"amazi