hanging lamps. Hardly any flowers compose the
nosegays, nothing but foliage--some rare and priceless, others chosen, as
if purposely, from the commonest plants, arranged, however, with such
taste as to make them appear new and choice; ordinary lettuce-leaves,
tall cabbage-stalks are placed with exquisite artificial taste in vessels
of marvellous workmanship. All the vases are of bronze, but the designs
are varied according to each changing fancy: some complicated and
twisted, others, and by far the larger number, graceful and simple, but
of a simplicity so studied and exquisite that to our eyes they seem the
revelation of an unknown art, the subversion of all acquired notions of
form.

On turning a corner of a street, by good luck we meet our married
comrades of the Triomphante and Jonquille, Toukisan and Campanule! Bows
and curtseys are exchanged by the mousmes, reciprocal manifestations of
joy at meeting; then, forming a compact band, we are carried off by the
ever-increasing crowd and continue our progress in the direction of the
temple.

The streets gradually ascend (the temples are always built on a height);
and by degrees, as we mount, there is added to the brilliant fairyland of
lanterns and costumes yet another, ethereally blue in the haze of
distance; all Nagasaki, its pagodas, its mountains, its still waters full
of the rays of moonlight, seem to rise with us into the air. Slowly, step
by step, one may say it springs up around, enveloping in one great
shimmering veil all the foreground, with its dazzling red lights and
many-colored streamers.

No doubt we are drawing near, for here are steps, porticoes and monsters
hewn out of enormous blocks of granite. We now have to climb a series of
steps, almost carried by the surging crowd ascending with us.

We have arrived at the temple courtyard.

This is the last and most astonishing scene in the evening's
fairy-tale--a luminous and weird scene, with fantastic distances lighted
up by the moon, with the gigantic trees, the sacred cryptomerias,
elevating their sombre boughs into a vast dome.

Here we are all seated with our mousmes, beneath the light awning,
wreathed in flowers, of one of the many little teahouses improvised in
this courtyard. We are on a terrace at the top of the great steps, up
which the crowd continues to flock, and at the foot of a portico which
stands erect with the rigid massiveness of a colossus against the dark
night sky; at the foot als