and the deep harbor, reaches us, Chrysantheme rises and slyly
shuts the panels I have opened.

Before that, however, she will have risen at least three times to smoke:
having yawned like a cat, stretched herself, twisted in every direction
her little amber arms, and her graceful little hands, she sits up
resolutely, with all the waking sighs and broken syllables of a child,
pretty and fascinating enough; then she emerges from the gauze net,
fills her little pipe, and breathes a few puffs of the bitter and
unpleasant mixture.

Then comes tap, tap, tap, tap, against the box to shake out the ashes.
In the silence of the night it makes quite a terrible noise, which wakes
Madame Prune. This is fatal. Madame Prune is at once seized also with a
longing to smoke which may not be denied; then, to the noise from above,
comes an answering tap, tap, tap, tap, from below, exactly like it,
exasperating and inevitable as an echo.

CHAPTER XXVII. THE PRAYERFUL MADAME PRUNE

More cheerful are the sounds of morning: the cocks crowing, the wooden
panels all around the neighborhood sliding back upon their rollers; or
the strange cry of some fruit-seller, patrolling our lofty suburb in the
early dawn. And the grasshoppers actually seem to chirp more loudly, to
celebrate the return of the sunlight.

Above all, rises to our ears from below the sound of Madame Prune's
long prayers, ascending through the floor, monotonous as the song of a
somnambulist, regular and soothing as the plash of a fountain. It lasts
three quarters of an hour at least, it drones along, a rapid flow of
words in a high nasal key; from time to time, when the inattentive
spirits are not listening, it is accompanied by a clapping of dry palms,
or by harsh sounds from a kind of wooden clapper made of two discs of
mandragora root. It is an uninterrupted stream of prayer; its flow never
ceases, and the quavering continues without stopping, like the bleating
of a delirious old goat.

"After washing the hands and feet," say the sacred books, "the great
God Ama-Terace-Omi-Kami, who is the royal power of Japan, must be
invoked; the manes of all the defunct emperors descended from him
must also be invoked; next, the manes of all his personal ancestors,
to the farthest generation; the spirits of the air and the sea; the
spirits of all secret and impure places; the spirits of the tombs of
the district whence you spring, etc., etc."

"I worship and i