becoming more and more accentuated, is like the impetuous sound of a far-
off hurricane. At the end, when these girlish voices, usually so soft,
give out their hoarse and guttural notes, Chrysantheme's hands fly wildly
and convulsively over the quivering strings. Both of them lower their
heads, pout their underlips in the effort to bring out these
astonishingly deep notes. And at these moments their little narrow eyes
open, and seem to reveal an unexpected something, almost a soul, under
these trappings of marionettes.

But it is a soul which more than ever appears to me of a different
species from my own; I feel my thoughts to be as far removed from theirs
as from the flitting conceptions of a bird, or the dreams of a monkey; I
feel there is between them and myself a great gulf, mysterious and awful.

Other sounds of music, wafted to us from the distance, interrupt for a
moment those of our mousmes. From the depths below, in Nagasaki, arises
a sudden noise of gongs and guitars; we rush to the balcony of the
veranda to hear it better.

It is a 'matsouri', a fete, a procession passing through the quarter
which is not so virtuous as our own, so our mousmes tell us, with a
disdainful toss of the head. Nevertheless, from the heights on which we
dwell, seen thus in a bird's-eye view, by the uncertain light of the
stars, this district has a singularly chaste air, and the concert going
on therein, purified in its ascent from the depths of the abyss to our
lofty altitudes, reaches us confusedly, a smothered, enchanted,
enchanting sound.

Then it diminishes, and dies away into silence.