And then, how much I admire the flowers arranged by Chrysanthème in our vases, with her Japanese taste: lotus flowers, great sacred flowers of a tender, veined rose-color, the milky rose-color seen on porcelain; they resemble, when in full bloom, great water-lilies, and when only in bud, might be taken for long pale tulips. Their soft but rather cloying scent is added to that other indefinable odor of mousmés, of yellow race, of Japan, which is always and everywhere in the air. The late flowers of September, at this season very rare and expensive, grow on longer stems than the summer blooms; Chrysanthème has left them their immense aquatic leaves of a melancholy seaweed-green, and mingled with them tall slight rushes. I look at them, and recall with some irony those great round bunches in the shape of cauliflowers, which our florists sell in France, wrapt in their white lace-paper. Still no letters from Europe, from any one. How things change, become effaced and forgotten. Here I am accommodating myself to this finical Japan and dwindling down to its affected mannerism; I feel that my thoughts run in smaller grooves, my tastes incline to smaller things,--things which suggest nothing greater than a smile. I am becoming used to tiny and ingenious furniture, to doll-like desks, to miniature bowls with which to play at dinner, to the immaculate monotony of the mats, to the finely finished simplicity of the white woodwork. I am even losing my Western prejudices; all my preconceived ideas are this evening evaporating and vanishing; crossing the garden I have courteously saluted M. Sucre, who was watering his dwarf shrubs and his deformed flowers; and Madame Prune appears to me a highly respectable old lady, in whose past there is nothing to criticise. We shall take no walk to-night; my only wish is to remain stretched out where I am, listening to the music of my mousmé's _chamécen_. Till now, I have always used the word _guitar_, to avoid exotic terms, for the abuse of which I have been so reproached. But neither the word _guitar_ nor _mandolin_ suffices to designate this slender instrument with its long neck, the high notes of which are shriller than the voice of the grasshopper; henceforth, I will write _chamécen_. I will also call my mousmé _Kikou, Kikou-San_; this name suits her better than Chrysanthème, which though translating the sense exactly, does not preserve the strange-sounding euphony of the original. I therefore say to Kikou, my wife: "Play, play on for me; I shall remain here all the evening and listen to you."