All along the streets leading to the temple, the wealthy inhabitants have decorated the fronts of their houses with a quantity of vases and nosegays. The peculiar shed-like buildings habitual in this country, with their open platform frontage, are particularly well suited for the display of choice objects; all the houses have been thrown open, and the interiors are hung with draperies that hide the back of the apartments. In front of these hangings and slightly standing back from the movement of the passing crowd, the various exhibited articles are methodically placed in a row, under the full glare of hanging lamps. Hardly any flowers compose the nosegays, nothing but foliage,--some rare and priceless, others chosen as if purposely from amongst the commonest plants, arranged however with such taste as to make them appear new and choice; ordinary lettuce leaves, tall cabbage stalks are placed with exquisite artificial taste in vessels of marvelous workmanship. All the vases are of bronze, but the designs are varied according to each changing fancy: some complicated and twisted; others, and by far the largest number, graceful and simple, but of a simplicity so studied and exquisite that to our eyes they seem the revelation of an unknown art, the subversion of all acquired notions on form. * * * * * On turning a corner of a street, by good luck we meet our married comrades of the _Triomphante_ and Jonquille, Touki-San and Campanule! Bows and curtsies are exchanged by the mousmés, reciprocal manifestations of joy at meeting; then, forming a compact band, we are carried off by the ever-increasing crowd and continue our progress in the direction of the temple. The streets gradually ascend (the temples are always built on a height); and by degrees as we mount up, there is added to the brilliant fairyland of lanterns and costumes, yet another, ethereally blue in the haze of distance; all Nagasaki, its pagodas, its mountains, its still waters full of the rays of moonlight, seem to rise up with us into the air. Slowly, step by step, one may say it springs up around, enveloping in one great shimmering veil all the foreground, with its dazzling red lights and many-colored streamers. No doubt we are getting near, for here are the religious steps, porticos and monsters hewn out of enormous blocks of granite. We now have to climb a series of steps, almost earned by the surging crowd ascending with us. The temple court-yard; we have arrived. This is the last and most astonishing scene in the evening's fairy-tale,--a luminous and weird scene with fantastic distances lighted up by the moon and the gigantic trees, the sacred cryptomerias, stretching forth their dark somber boughs like a vast dome.