wooden shoes, looking exactly like the figures painted on screens,
tucked up under a gaudily daubed paper umbrella. Or else we passed a
pagoda, where an old granite monster, squatting in the water, seemed
to make a hideous, ferocious grimace at me.

How immense 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 could never suppose from the offing that so vast a plain could lie
in the recesses 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 by the side of this fellow.
When I part my oil-cloths to peep at anything, he is naturally always
the first object in my foreground: his two naked, brown, muscular
legs, scampering one after the other, 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; by exception to the general rule,
he is good-looking;--a young man of about thirty years of age, of