We want to take one last stroll together in our old familiar pleasure
haunts, drink one more iced sherbet at the house of the _Indescribable
Butterflies_, buy one more lantern at Madame Très-Propre's, and eat
some parting waffles at Madame L'Heure's!

I try to be affected, moved, by this leave-taking, but without
success. In this Japan, as with the little men and women who inhabit
it, there is something decidedly wanting; pleasant enough as a mere
pastime, it begets no feeling of attachment.

On our return, when I am once more with Yves and the two mousmés
climbing up the road to Diou-djen-dji, which I shall probably never
see again, a vague feeling of melancholy pervades my last stroll.

It is, however, but the melancholy inseparable from all things that
are about to end without possibility of return.

Moreover, this calm and splendid summer is also drawing to a close for
us,--since to-morrow we shall go forth to meet the autumn, in Northern
China. I am beginning, alas! to count the youthful summers I may still
hope for; I feel more gloomy each time another fades away, and flies
to rejoin the others already disappeared in the dark and bottomless
abyss, where all past things lie buried.

At midnight we return home, and my removal begins; while on board the
_amazingly tall friend_ kindly takes my watch.

It is a nocturnal, rapid, stealthy removal,--_"dorobo_ (thieves)
fashion" remarks Yves, who in frequenting the mousmés has picked up a