oldest records fail to explain them to
us in anything but a superficial and cursory manner, simply because we
have absolutely nothing in common with this people. We pass through
the midst of their mirth and their laughter without understanding the
wherefore, so totally do they differ from our own.

Chrysantheme with Yves, Oyouki with me, Fraise and Zinnia, our cousins,
walking before us under our watchful eyes, move slowly through the
crowd, holding hands lest we should lose one another.

Along the streets leading to the temple, the wealthy inhabitants have
decorated the fronts of their houses with vases and nosegays. The
peculiar shed-like buildings common in this country, with their open
platform frontage, are particularly well suited for the display of
choice objects; all the houses have been thrown open, and the interiors
are hung with draperies that hide the back of the apartments. In front
of these hangings, and standing slightly back from the movement of the
passing crowd, the various exhibited articles are placed methodically in
a row, under the full glare of 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