nly in drawings; all these, that I had beheld
painted on blue or pink backgrounds of fans or vases, now appeared to
me in their hard reality, under a dark sky, with umbrellas and wooden
shoes, with tucked-up skirts and pitiful aspect.

At times the rain fell so heavily that I closed up tightly every chink
and crevice, and the noise and shaking benumbed me, so that I completely
forgot in what country I was. In the hood of the cart were holes,
through which little streams ran down my back. Then, remembering that
I was going for the first time in my life through the very heart of
Nagasaki, I cast an inquiring look outside, at the risk of receiving a
drenching: we were trotting along through a mean, narrow, little back
street (there are thousands like it, a labyrinth of them), the
rain falling in cascades from the tops of the roofs on the gleaming
flagstones below, rendering everything indistinct and vague through the
misty atmosphere. At times we passed a woman struggling with her skirts,
unsteadily tripping along in her high wooden shoes, looking exactly like
the figures painted on screens, cowering under a gaudily daubed paper
umbrella. Again, we passed a pagoda, where an old granite monster,
squatting in the water, seemed to make a hideous, ferocious grimace at
me.

How large this Nagasaki is! Here had we been running hard for the last
hour, and still it seemed never-ending. It is a flat plain, and one
never would suppose from the view in the offing that so vast a plain
lies in the depth of this valley.

It would, however, have been impossible for me to say where I was, or in
what direction we had run; I abandoned my fate to my djin and to my good
luck.

What a steam-engine of a man my djin was! I had been accustomed to the
Chinese runners, but they were nothing beside this fellow. When I part
my oilcloth to peep at anything, he is naturally always the first object
in my foreground; his two naked, brown, muscular legs, scampering along,
splashing all around, and his bristling hedgehog back bending low in the
rain. Do the passers-by, gazing at this little dripping cart, guess that
it contains a suitor in quest of a bride?

At last my vehicle stops, and my djin, with many smiles and precautions
lest any fresh rivers should stream down my back, lowers the hood of the
cart; there is a break in the storm, and the rain has ceased. I had
not yet seen his face; as an exception to the general rule, he is
good-looking; a yo