pines, stunted peach and plum trees, wisteria bushes clipped and twisted
out of all likeness to wholesome plants, leaning and leering out of
green-glaze pots. In the flickering of the yellow flames, these forced
cripples and the yellow faces above them reeled to and fro fantastically
all together. As the light steadied they would return to the pretence of
being green things till a puff of the warm night wind among the flares
set the whole line off again in a crazy dance of dwergs, their shadows
capering on the house fronts behind them.

At a corner of a street, some rich men had got together and left
unguarded all the gold, diamonds, and rubies of the East; but when you
came near you saw that this treasure was only a gathering of goldfish in
glass globes--yellow, white, and red fish, with from three to five
forked tails apiece and eyes that bulged far beyond their heads. There
were wooden pans full of tiny ruby fish, and little children with nets
dabbled and shrieked in chase of some special beauty, and the frightened
fish kicked up showers of little pearls with their tails. The children
carried lanterns in the shape of small red paper fish bobbing at the end
of slivers of bamboo, and these drifted through the crowd like a strayed
constellation of baby stars. When the children stood at the edge of a
canal and called down to unseen friends in boats the pink lights were
all reflected orderly below. The light of the thousand small lights in
the street went straight up into the darkness among the interlacing
telegraph wires, and just at the edge of the shining haze, on a sort of
pigeon-trap, forty feet above ground, sat a Japanese fireman, wrapped up
in his cloak, keeping watch against fires. He looked unpleasantly like a
Bulgarian atrocity or a Burmese 'deviation from the laws of humanity,'
being very still and all huddled up in his roost. That was a superb
picture and it arranged itself to admiration. Now, disregarding these
things and others--wonders and miracles all--men are content to sit in