because I have no longer
any link to bind me to it, any resting-place on its soil, that my spirit
is ready on the wing? I know not, but it seems to me I have never as
clearly seen and comprehended it as to-day. And more even than ever do
I find it little, aged, with wornout blood and worn-out sap; I feel more
fully its antediluvian antiquity, its centuries of mummification, which
will soon degenerate into hopeless and grotesque buffoonery, as it comes
into contact with Western novelties.

It is getting late; little by little, the siestas are everywhere coming
to an end; the queer little streets brighten up and begin to swarm in
the sunshine with manycolored parasols. Now begins the procession of
ugliness of the most impossible description--a procession of long-robed,
grotesque figures capped with pot-hats or sailors' headgear. Business
transactions begin again, and the struggle for existence, close and
bitter here as in one of our own artisan quarters, but meaner and
smaller.

At the moment of my departure, I find within myself only a smile of
careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Lilliputian curtseying
people--laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted with a
constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and incurable
monkeyishness.

Poor cousin Number 415! how right I was to have held him in good esteem!
He was by far the best and most disinterested of my Japanese family.
When all my commissions are finished, he puts up his little vehicle
under a tree, and, much touched by my departure, insists upon escorting
me on board the 'Triomphante', to watch over my final purchases in the
sampan which conveys me to the ship, and to see them himself safely into
my cabin.

His, indeed, is the only hand I clasp with a really friendly feeling,
without a suppressed smile, on quitting Japan.

No doubt in this country, as in many others, there is more honest
friendship and less ugliness among the simple beings devoted to purely
physical work.

At five o'clock in the afternoon we set sail.

Along the line of the shore are two or three sampans; in them the
mousmes, shut up in the narrow cabins, peep at us through the tiny
windows, half hiding their faces on account of the sailors; these are
our wives, who have wished, out of politeness, to look upon us once
more.

There are other sampans as well, in which other Japanese women are
also watching our departure. These stand upright, under great parasols
d