tered with the
little cups of tea, the absurd little pipes, and the miniature trays.

"Let us watch them go away!" said Yves, leaning out. At the door of the
garden is a renewal of the same salutations and curtseys, and then the
two groups of women separate, their bedaubed paper lanterns fade away
trembling in the distance, balanced at the extremity of flexible canes
which they hold in their fingertips as one would hold a fishing-rod in
the dark to catch night-birds. The procession of the unfortunate
Mademoiselle Jasmin mounts upward toward the mountain, while that of
Mademoiselle Chrysantheme winds downward by a narrow old street,
half-stairway, half-goat-path, which leads to the town.

Then we also depart. The night is fresh, silent, exquisite, the eternal
song of the cicalas fills the air. We can still see the red lanterns of
my new family, dwindling away in the distance, as they descend and
gradually become lost in that yawning abyss, at the bottom of which lies
Nagasaki.

Our way, too, lies downward, but on an opposite slope by steep paths
leading to the sea.

And when I find myself once more on board, when the scene enacted on the
hill above recurs to my mind, it seems to me that my betrothal is a joke,
and my new family a set of puppets.

CHAPTER V

A FANTASTIC MARRIAGE

July 10, 1885.

Three days have passed since my marriage was an accomplished fact.

In the lower part of the town, in one of the new cosmopolitan districts,
in an ugly, pretentious building, which is a sort of registry office, the
deed was signed and countersigned, with marvellous hieroglyphics, in a
large book, in the presence of those absurd little creatures, formerly
silken-robed Samurai, but now called policemen, dressed up in tight
jackets and Russian caps.

The ceremony took place in the full heat of midday; Chrysantheme and her
mother arrived together, and I alone. We seemed to have met for the
purpose of ratifying some discreditable contract, and the two women
trembled in the presence of these ugly little men, who, in their eyes,
were the personification of the law.

In the middle of their official scrawl, they made me write in French my
name, Christian name, and profession. Then they gave me an extraordinary
document on a sheet of rice-paper, which set forth the permission granted
me by the civilian authorities of the island of Kiu-Siu, to inhabit a
house situated in the suburb of Diou-djen-dji, with a person called