nd at the tufts of grass and moss around me, a
thousand memories of those summers of my early life welled up within me,
memories which for years past had lain slumbering under this old wall,
sheltered by the ivy boughs. While all that is ourselves perpetually
changes and passes away, the constancy with which Nature repeats, always
in the same manner, her most infinitesimal details, seems a wonderful
mystery; the same peculiar species of moss grows afresh for centuries on
precisely the same spot, and the same little insects each summer do the
same thing in the same place.

I must admit that this episode of my childhood, and the spiders,
have little to do with the story of Chrysantheme. But an incongruous
interruption is quite in keeping with the taste of this country;
everywhere it is practised, in conversation, in music, even in painting;
a landscape painter, for instance, when he has finished a picture of
mountains and crags, will not hesitate to draw, in the very middle of
the sky, a circle, or a lozenge, or some kind of framework, within which
he will represent anything incoherent and inappropriate: a bonze fanning
himself, or a lady taking a cup of tea. Nothing is more thoroughly
Japanese than such digressions, made without the slightest apropos.

Moreover, if I roused my past memories, it was the better to force
myself to notice the difference between that day of July last year,
so peacefully spent amid surroundings familiar to me from my earliest
infancy, and my present animated life passed in the midst of such a
novel world.

To-day, therefore, under the scorching midday sun, at two o'clock, three
swift-footed djins dragged us at full speed--Yves, Chrysantheme, and
myself--in Indian file, each in a little jolting cart, to the farther
end of Nagasaki, and there deposited us at the foot of some gigantic
steps that run straight up the mountain.

These are the granite steps leading to the great temple of Osueva,
wide enough to give access to a whole regiment; they are as grand and
imposing as any work of Babylon or Nineveh, and in complete contrast
with all the finical surroundings.

We climb up and up--Chrysantheme listlessly, affecting fatigue, under
her paper parasol painted with pink butterflies on a black ground. As we
ascended, we passed under enormous monastic porticoes, also in granite
of rude and primitive style. In truth, these steps and these temple
porticoes are the only imposing works that this peop