hall marry! But no, the picture
painted by my fancy has faded. I can no longer see this little creature
in my mind's eye; the sellers of the white mice have blurred her image; I
fear now, lest she should be like them.

At nightfall the decks were suddenly cleared as by enchantment; in a
second they had shut up their boxes, folded their sliding screens and
their trick fans, and, humbly bowing to each of us, the little men and
little women disappeared.

Slowly, as the shades of night closed around us, mingling all things in
the bluish darkness, Japan became once more, little by little, a
fairy-like and enchanted country. The great mountains, now black, were
mirrored and doubled in the still water at their feet, reflecting therein
their sharply reversed outlines, and presenting the mirage of fearful
precipices, over which we seemed to hang. The stars also were reversed in
their order, making, in the depths of the imaginary abyss, a sprinkling
of tiny phosphorescent lights.

Then all Nagasaki became profusely illuminated, sparkling with multitudes
of lanterns: the smallest suburb, the smallest village was lighted up;
the tiniest but perched up among the trees, which in the daytime was
invisible, threw out its little glowworm glimmer. Soon there were
innumerable lights all over the country on all the shores of the bay,
from top to bottom of the mountains; myriads of glowing fires shone out
in the darkness, conveying the impression of a vast capital rising around
us in one bewildering amphitheatre. Beneath, in the silent waters,
another town, also illuminated, seemed to descend into the depths of the
abyss. The night was balmy, pure, delicious; the atmosphere laden with
the perfume of flowers came wafted to us from the mountains. From the
tea-houses and other nocturnal resorts, the sound of guitars reached our
ears, seeming in the distance the sweetest of music. And the whirr of the
cicalas--which, in Japan, is one of the continuous noises of life, and
which in a few days we shall no longer even be aware of, so completely is
it the background and foundation of all other terrestrial sounds--was
sonorous, incessant, softly monotonous, like the murmur of a waterfall.

CHAPTER III

THE GARDEN OF FLOWERS

The next day the rain fell in torrents, merciless and unceasing, blinding
and drenching everything--a rain so dense that it was impossible to see
through it from one end of the vessel to the other. It seemed as if the