ession of long-robed, grotesque
figures capped with pot-hats or sailors' headgear. Business transactions
begin again, and the struggle for existence, close and bitter here as in
one of our own artisan quarters, but meaner and smaller.

At the moment of my departure, I find within myself only a smile of
careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Lilliputian curtseying
people--laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted with a
constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and incurable
monkeyishness.

Poor cousin Number 415! how right I was to have held him in good esteem!
He was by far the best and most disinterested of my Japanese family. When
all my commissions are finished, he puts up his little vehicle under a
tree, and, much touched by my departure, insists upon escorting me on
board the 'Triomphante', to watch over my final purchases in the sampan
which conveys me to the ship, and to see them himself safely into my
cabin.

His, indeed, is the only hand I clasp with a really friendly feeling,
without a suppressed smile, on quitting 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.

CHAPTER LIV

A FADING PICTURE

We move slowly out of the wide green bay. The groups of women grow
smaller in the distance. The country of round umbrellas with a thousand
ribs fades gradually from our sight.

Now the vast ocean opens before us, immense, colorless, solitary; a
solemn repose after so much that is too ingenious and too small.

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

CHAPTER LV

A WITHERED LOTUS-FLOWER

One evening, in my cabin,