custom to serve hot, in elegantly shaped vases, long-necked like a
heron's throat).

Several mousmes execute, one after another, improvisations on the
'chamecen'. Others sing in sharp, high voices, hopping about
continually, like cicalas in delirium.

Madame Prune, no longer able to make a mystery of the long-pent up
feelings that agitate her, pays me the most marked and tender attentions,
and begs my acceptance of a quantity of little souvenirs: an image,
a little vase, a little porcelain goddess of the moon in Satsuma ware,
a marvellously grotesque ivory figure;--I tremblingly follow her into
the dark corners whither she calls me to give me these presents in tete-
a-tete.

About nine o'clock, with a silken rustling, arrive the three geishas in
vogue in Nagasaki: Mesdemoiselles Purete, Orange, and Printemps, whom I
have hired at four dollars each--an enormous price in this country.

These three geishas are indeed the very same little creatures I heard
singing on the rainy day of my arrival, through the thin panelling of the
Garden of Flowers. But as I have now become thoroughly Japanized, today
they appear to me more diminutive, less outlandish, and in no way
mysterious. I treat them rather as dancers that I have hired, and the
idea that I ever had thought of marrying one of them now makes me shrug
my shoulders--as it formerly made M. Kangourou.

The excessive heat caused by the respiration of the mousmes and the
burning lamps, brings out the perfume of the lotus, which fills the
heavy-laden atmosphere; and the scent of camellia-oil, which the ladies