ellow race, of Japan, which is always and everywhere in the air. The
late flowers of September, at this season very rare and expensive, grow
on longer stems than the summer blooms; Chrysantheme has left them in
their large aquatic leaves of a melancholy seaweed-green, and mingled
with them tall, slight rushes. I look at them, and recall with some irony
those great round bunches in the shape of cauliflowers, which our
florists sell in France, wrapped in white lace-paper!

Still no letters from Europe, from any one. How things change, become
effaced and forgotten! Here am I, accommodating myself to this finical
Japan and dwindling down to its affected mannerism; I feel that my
thoughts run in smaller grooves, my tastes incline to smaller
things-things which suggest nothing greater than a smile. I am becoming
used to tiny and ingenious furniture, to doll-like desks, to miniature
bowls with which to play at dinner, to the immaculate monotony of the
mats, to the finely finished simplicity of the white woodwork. I am even
losing my Western prejudices; all my preconceived ideas are this evening
evaporating and vanishing; crossing the garden I have courteously saluted
M. Sucre, who was watering his dwarf shrubs and his deformed flowers; and
Madame Prune appears to me a highly respectable old lady, in whose past
there is nothing to criticise.

We shall take no walk to-night; my only wish is to remain stretched out
where I am, listening to the music of my mousme's 'chamecen'.

Till now I have always used the word guitar, to avoid exotic terms, for
the abuse of which I have been so reproached. But neither the word guitar
nor mandolin suffices to designate this slender instrument with its long
neck, the high notes of which are shriller than the voice of the
grasshopper; and henceforth, I will write 'chamecen'.

I will also call my mousme Kikou, Kikou-San; this name suits her better
than Chrysantheme, which, though translating the sense exactly, does not
preserve the strange-sounding euphony of the original.

I therefore say to Kikou, my wife:

"Play, play on for me; I shall remain here all the evening and listen to
you."

Astonished to find me in so amiable a mood, she requires pressing a
little, and with almost a bitter curve of triumph and disdain upon her
lips, she seats herself in the attitude of an idol, raises her long,
dark-colored sleeves, and begins. The first hesitating notes are murmured
faintly and mingle with th