-off hurricane. At the end, when these girlish
voices, generally so soft, give out their hoarse and guttural notes,
Chrysantheme's hands fly wildly and convulsively over the quivering
strings. Both of them lower their heads, pout their under-lips in the
effort of bringing out these astonishingly deep notes. And at these
moments, their little narrow eyes open and seem to reveal an
unexpected something, almost a soul, under these trappings of
marionnettes.

But it is a soul which more than ever appears to me of a different
species to my own; I feel my thoughts to be far removed from theirs,
as from the flitting conceptions of a bird, or the dreams of a monkey;
I feel there is betwixt them and myself a great gulf, mysterious and
awful.

Other sounds of music, wafted to us from the distance outside,
interrupt for a moment that of our mousmes. From the depths below,
down in Nagasaki, arises a sudden noise of gongs and guitars; we rush
to the balcony of the verandah to hear it better.

It is a _matsouri_, a fete, a procession passing through the quarter
which is not so virtuous as our own, so our mousmes tell us, with a
disdainful toss of the head. Nevertheless, from the heights on which
we dwell, seen thus in a bird's-eye view, by the uncertain light of
the stars, this district has a singularly chaste air, and the concert
going on therein, purified in its ascent from the depths of the abyss
to our lofty altitudes, reaches us confusedly, a smothered, enchanted,
enchanting sound.

Then it diminishes, and dies away into silence.

The two little friends return to their seats on the mats, and once
more take up their melancholy duet. An orchestra, discreetly subdued
but innumerable, of crickets and cicalas, accompanies them in an
unceasing tremolo,--the immense far-reaching tremolo, which, gentle
and eternal, never ceases on Japanese land.

LI.

_September 17th_.

During the hour of siesta, the abrupt order arrives to start to-morrow
for China, for Tchefou (a horrid place in the gulf of Pekin). It is
Yves who comes to wake me in my cabin to bring me the news.

"I must positively get leave to go on shore this evening," he says,
while I endeavor to shake myself awake, "if it is only to help you to
dismantle and pack up there."

He gazes through my port-hole, raising his glance towards the green
summits, in the direction of Diou-djen-dji and our echoing old
cottage, hidden from us by a turn of the mountain.

I