, and remains in this attitude of superlatively
polite salute as long as I am in sight, while I go down the pathway by
which I am to disappear for ever.

As the distance between us increases, I turn once or twice to look at
her again; but it is a mere civility, and meant to return as it
deserves her grand final salutation.

LIII.

On entering the town, at the turn of the principal street, I have the
good luck to meet No. 415, my poor relation. I was just at that moment
in want of a speedy djin, and I at once get into his vehicle; besides,
it will be an alleviation to my feelings, in this hour of departure,
to take my last drive in company with a member of my family.

Unaccustomed as I was to be out of doors during the hours of siesta,
I had never yet seen the streets of the town thus overwhelmed by the
sunshine, thus deserted in the silence and solitary brilliancy
peculiar to all hot countries.

In front of all the shops hang white shades, adorned here and there
with slight designs in black, in the quaintness of which lurks I know
not what,--something mysterious: dragons, emblems, symbolical figures
The sky is too glaring; the light crude, implacable; never has this
old town of Nagasaki appeared to me so old, so worm-eaten, so bald,
notwithstanding all its veneer of new papers and gaudy paintings.
These little wooden houses, of such marvelous cleanly whiteness
inside, are black outside, time-worn, disjointed and _grimacing_. When
one looks closely, this grimace is to be found everywhere: in the
hideous masks laughing in the shop fronts of the innumerable
curio-shops; in the grotesque figures, the playthings, the idols,
cruel, suspicious mad;--it is even found in the buildings: in the
friezes of the religious porticos, in the roofs of the thousand
pagodas; of which the angles and gable-ends writhe and twist like the
yet dangerous remains of ancient and malignant beasts.

And the disturbing intensity of expression reigning over inanimate
nature, contrasts with the almost absolute blank of the human
countenance, with the smiling foolishness of the simple little folk
who meet one's gaze, as they patiently carry on their minute trades in
the gloom of their tiny open-fronted houses. Workmen squatted on their
heels, carving with their imperceptible tools, the droll or odiously
obscene ivory ornaments, marvelous cabinet curiosities which have made
Japan so famous with the European amateurs who have never seen it.