urios. We sit down on the mattings, in the
antique-sellers' little booths, take a cup of tea with the salesmen,
and rummage with our own hands in the cupboards and chests, where many
a fantastic piece of old rubbish is huddled away. The bargaining,
much discussed, is laughingly carried on for several days, as though
we were trying to play off some excellent little practical joke upon
each other.

I really make a sad abuse of the adjective _little_, I am quite aware
of it, but how can I do otherwise? In describing this country, the
temptation is great to use it ten times in every written line. Little,
finical, affected,--all Japan is contained, both physically and
morally, in these three words.

My purchases are accumulating up there, in my little wood and paper
house; but how much more Japanese it really was, in its bare
emptiness, such as M. Sucre and Madame Prune had conceived it. There
are now many lamps of a religious shape hanging from the ceiling; many
stools and many vases, as many gods and goddesses as in a pagoda.

There is even a little Shintoist altar, before which Madame Prune has
not been able to restrain her feelings, and before which she has
fallen down and chanted her prayers in her bleating old nanny-goat
voice:

"Wash me clean from all my impurity, oh Ama-Terace-Omi-Kami, as one
washes away uncleanness in the river of Kamo."

Alas for poor Ama-Terace-Omi-Kami to have to wash away the impurities
of Madame Prune! What a tedious and ungrateful task!!

Chrysantheme, who is a Buddhist, prays sometimes in the evening before
lying down; although overcome with sleep, she prays clapping her hands
before the largest of our gilded idols. But she smiles with a childish
disrespect for her Buddha, directly her prayer is ended. I know that
she has also a certain veneration for her _Ottokes_ (the Spirits of
her ancestors), whose rather sumptuous altar is set up at her
mother's, Madame Renoncule's. She asks for their blessings, for
fortune and wisdom.

Who can make out her ideas about the gods, or about death? Does she
possess a soul? Does she think she has one? Her religion is an obscure
chaos of theogonies as old as the world, treasured up out of respect
for ancient customs; and of more recent ideas about the blessed final
annihilation, imported from India at the epoch of our middle ages by
saintly Chinese missionaries. The bonzes themselves are puzzled; what
a muddle, therefore, must not all this become, wh