fely
into my cabin.

His, indeed, is the only hand I clasp with a really friendly feeling,
without a suppressed smile, on quitting this 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
decorated with big black letters and daubed over with clouds of varied
and startling colors.

LIV.

We move slowly out of the great green bay. The groups of women become
lost in the distance. The country of round and thousand-ribbed
umbrellas fades gradually from our sight.

Now the great sea opens before us, immense, colorless, solitary; a
solemn repose after so much that was too ingenious and too small.

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

LV.

In my cabin, one evening, in the midst of the Yellow Sea, my eyes
chance to fall upon the lotus brought from Diou-djen-dji;--they had
lasted for two or three days; but now they have faded, and pitifully
strew my carpet with their pale pink petals.

I, who have carefully preserved 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 almost a herbarium, ridiculous and incoherent--I try hard, but
without success, to get up a 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 livid light falls upon the waters; a wan and
gloomy kind of twilight creeps down, yellowish upon this Yellow Sea.
We feel that we are moving northwards, that autumn is approaching.

I throw the poor lotus into the boundless waste of waters, makin