ecorated with big black letters and daubed over with clouds of varied
and startling colors.

CHAPTER LIV. A FADING PICTURE

We move slowly out of the wide green bay. The groups of women grow
smaller in the distance. The country of round umbrellas with a thousand
ribs fades gradually from our sight.

Now the vast ocean opens before us, immense, colorless, solitary; a
solemn repose after so much that is too ingenious and too small.

The wooded mountains, the flowery capes disappear. And Japan remains
faithful to itself, with its picturesque rocks, its quaint islands
on which the trees tastefully arrange themselves in groups--studied,
perhaps, but charmingly pretty.

CHAPTER LV. A WITHERED LOTUS-FLOWER

One evening, in my cabin, in the midst of the Yellow Sea, my eyes fall
upon the lotus-blossoms brought from Diou-djen-dji; they had
lasted several days; but now they are withered, and strew my carpet
pathetically with their pale pink petals.

I, who have carefully kept so many faded flowers, fallen, alas! into
dust, stolen here and there, at moments of parting in different parts
of the world; I, who have kept so many that the collection is now an
absurd, an indistinguishable herbarium--I try hard, but without success,
to awaken some sentiment for these lotus--and yet they are the last
living souvenirs of my summer at Nagasaki.

I pick them up, however, with a certain amount of consideration, and I
open my port-hole.

From the gray misty sky a strange light falls upon the waters; a dim and
gloomy twilight descends, yellowish upon this Yellow Sea. We feel that
we are moving northward, that autumn is approaching.

I throw the poor lotus into the boundless waste of waters, making them
my best excuses for consigning them, natives of Japan, to a grave so
solemn and so vast.

An Appeal to the Gods

Oama-Terace-Omi-Kami, wash me clean
from this little marriage of mine,
in the waters of the river of Kamo!

ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Ah! the natural perversity of inanimate things
Contemptuous pity, both for my suspicions and the cause of them
Dull hours spent in idle and diffuse conversation
Efforts to arrange matters we succeed often only in disarranging
Found nothing that answered to my indefinable expectations
Habit turns into a makeshift of attachment
I know not what lost home that I have failed to find
Irrita