rather cloying scent is added to that other indefinable odor of mousmes,
of yellow race, of Japan, which is always and everywhere in the air.
The late flowers of September, at this season very rare and expensive,
grow on longer stems than the summer blooms; Chrysantheme has left them
in their large aquatic leaves of a melancholy seaweed-green, and mingled
with them tall, slight rushes. I look at them, and recall with some
irony those great round bunches in the shape of cauliflowers, which our
florists sell in France, wrapped in white lace-paper!

Still no letters from Europe, from any one. How things change, become
effaced and forgotten! Here am I, accommodating myself to this finical
Japan and dwindling down to its affected mannerism; I feel that my
thoughts run in smaller grooves, my tastes incline to smaller things--
things which suggest nothing greater than a smile. I am becoming used to
tiny and ingenious furniture, to doll-like desks, to miniature bowls with
which to play at dinner, to the immaculate monotony of the mats, to the
finely finished simplicity of the white woodwork. I am even losing my
Western prejudices; all my preconceived ideas are this evening
evaporating and vanishing; crossing the garden I have courteously saluted
M. Sucre, who was watering his dwarf shrubs and his deformed flowers; and
Madame Prune appears to me a highly respectable old lady, in whose past
there is nothing to criticise.

We shall take no walk to-night; my only wish is to remain stretched out
where I am, listening to the music of my mousme's 'chamecen'.

Till now I have always used the word guitar, to avoid exotic terms, for
the abuse of which I have been so reproached. But neither the word
guitar nor mandolin suffices to designate this slender instrument with
its long neck, the high notes of which are shriller than the voice of the