on the granite islands, which are
of the same color as their own gray shells.

There are even blue dragon-flies which have ventured to descend,
heaven knows whence, and alight with quivering wings upon the miniature
water-lilies.

Our friends the bonzes, notwithstanding an unctuousness of manner
thoroughly ecclesiastical, are very ready to laugh--a simple, pleased,
childish laughter; plump, chubby, shaven and shorn, they dearly love our
French liqueurs and know how to take a joke.

We talk first of one thing and then another. To the tranquil music of
their little cascade, I launch out before them with phrases of the
most erudite Japanese, I try the effect of a few tenses of verbs:
'desideratives, concessives, hypothetics in ba'. While they chant they
despatch the affairs of the church: the order of services sealed with
complicated seals for inferior pagodas situated in the neighborhood; or
trace little prayers with a cunning paint-brush, as medical remedies to
be swallowed like pills by invalids at a distance. With their white and
dimpled hands they play with a fan as cleverly as any woman, and when we
have tasted different native drinks, flavored with essences of flowers,
they bring up as a finish a bottle of Benedictine or Chartreuse, for
they appreciate the liqueurs composed by their Western colleagues.

When they come on board to return our visits, they by no means disdain
to fasten their great round spectacles on their flat noses in order
to inspect the profane drawings in our illustrated papers, the 'Vie
Parisienne' for instance. And it is even with a certain complacency that
they let their fingers linger upon the pictures representing women.

The religious ceremonies in their great temple are magnificent, and
to one of these we are now invited. At the sound of the gong they make
their entrance before the idols with a stately ritual; twenty or thirty
priests officiate in gala costumes, with genuflections, clapping of
hands and movements to and fro, which look like the figures of some
mystic quadrille.

But for all that, let the sanctuary be ever so immense and imposing in
its sombre gloom, the idols ever so superb, all seems in Japan but a
mere semblance of grandeur. A hopeless pettiness, an irresistible effect
the ludicrous, lies at the bottom of all things.

And then the congregation is not conducive to thoughtful contemplation,
for among it we usually discover some acquaintance: my mother-in-law,
or a c