It is getting late; little by little, the siestas are everywhere coming
to an end; the queer little streets brighten up and begin to swarm in the
sunshine with many-colored parasols. Now begins the procession of
ugliness of the most impossible description--a procession of long-robed,
grotesque figures capped with pot-hats or sailors' headgear. Business
transactions begin again, and the struggle for existence, close and
bitter here as in one of our own artisan quarters, but meaner and
smaller.

At the moment of my departure, I find within myself only a smile of
careless mockery for the swarming crowd of this Lilliputian curtseying
people--laborious, industrious, greedy of gain, tainted with a
constitutional affectation, hereditary insignificance, and incurable
monkeyishness.

Poor cousin Number 415! how right I was to have held him in good esteem!
He was by far the best and most disinterested of my Japanese family.
When all my commissions are finished, he puts up his little vehicle under
a tree, and, much touched by my departure, insists upon escorting me on
board the 'Triomphante', to watch over my final purchases in the sampan
which conveys me to the ship, and to see them himself safely into my
cabin.

His, indeed, is the only hand I clasp with a really friendly feeling,
without a suppressed smile, on quitting Japan.

No doubt in this country, as in many others, there is more honest
friendship and less ugliness among the simple beings devoted to purely
physical work.