Here we are all seated with our mousmés, beneath the light awning wreathed in flowers, of one of the many little tea-houses improvised in this courtyard. We are on a terrace at the top of the great steps, up which the crowd continues to flock; we are at the foot of a portico which stands up erect with the rigid massiveness of a colossus against the dark night sky; at the foot also of a monster, who stares down upon us, with his big stony eyes, his cruel grimace and smile. This portico and the monster are the two great overwhelming masses in the foreground of the incredible scene before us; they stand out with dazzling boldness against the vague and ashy blue of the distant sphere beyond; behind them, Nagasaki is spread out in a bird's-eye view, faintly outlined in the transparent darkness with myriads of little colored lights, and the extravagantly dented profile of the mountains is delineated on the starlit sky, blue upon blue, transparency upon transparency. A corner of the harbor is also visible, high up, undefined like a lake lost in the clouds; the water faintly illumined by a ray of moonlight shining forth like a sheet of silver. Around us the long crystal trumpets keep up their gobble. Groups of polite and frivolous persons pass and repass like fantastic shadows: childish bands of small-eyed mousmés with smile so candidly meaningless and chignons shining through their bright silver flowers; ugly men waving at the end of long branches their eternal lanterns shaped like birds, gods or insects. Behind us, in the lit-up and wide-open temple, the bonzes sit, immovable embodiments of doctrine, in the glittering sanctuary inhabited by divinities, chimeras and symbols. The crowd, monotonously droning its mingled prayers and laughter, presses around them, sowing its alms broadcast; with a continuous jingle, the money rolls on the ground into the precincts reserved to the priests, where the white mats entirely disappear under the mass of many-sized coins accumulated there as after a deluge of silver and bronze. We, however, feel thoroughly at sea in the midst of this festivity; we look on, we laugh like the rest, we make foolish and senseless remarks in a language insufficiently learned, and which this evening, I know not why, we can hardly understand. Notwithstanding the night breeze, we find it very hot under our awning, and we absorb quantities of funny-looking water-ices, served in cups, which taste like scented frost, or rather like flowers steeped in snow. Our mousmés order for themselves great bowls of candied beans mixed with hail,--real hail-stones such as we would pick up after a hail-storm in March.