dog-whistles, trumpets. Each time it is something more and more
absurd, so that at last we are overcome with uncontrollable fits of
laughter. Last of all, an aged Japanese optician, who assumes a most
knowing air, a look of sublime wisdom, goes off to forage in his back
shop, and brings to light a steam fog-horn, a relic from some wrecked
steamer.

After dinner, the chief event of the evening is a deluge of rain which
takes us by surprise as we leave the tea-houses, on our return from
our fashionable stroll. It so happened that we were a large party,
having with us several mousmé guests, and from the moment that the
rain began to fall from the skies, as if out of a watering-pot turned
upside down, the band became disorganized. The mousmés run off, with
birdlike cries, and take refuge under door-ways, in the shops, under
the hoods of the djins.

Then, before long,--when the shops shut up in haste, when the emptied
streets are flooded, and almost black, and the paper lanterns, piteous
objects, wet through and extinguished,--I find myself, I know not how
it happens, flattened against a wall, under the projecting eaves,
alone in the company of Mdlle. Fraise, my cousin, who is crying
bitterly because her fine dress is wet through. And in the noise of
the rain, which is still falling and splashing everything; with the
spouts and gutters, which in the darkness plaintively murmur like
running streams, the town appears to me suddenly an abode of the
gloomiest sadness.

The shower is soon over, and the mousmés come out of their holes like
so many mice; they look for each other, call each other, and their
little voices take the singular melancholy, dragging inflections they