Now the soft balmy breezes blow through the room, from one verandah to the other, making the flames of the lamps flicker. They scatter the lotus flowers faded by the artificial heat, which, falling in pieces from every vase, sprinkle the guests with their pollen and large pink petals, looking like bits of broken opal-colored glass. The sensational piece, reserved for the end, is a trio on the _chamécen_, long and monotonous, that the guéchas perform as a rapid _pizzicato_ on the highest strings, very sharply struck. It sounds like the very quintescence, the paraphrase, the exasperation if I may so call it, of the eternal buzz of insects, which issues from the trees, old roofs, old walls, from everything in fact, and which is the ground-work of all Japanese sounds. Half-past ten! The program has been carried out, and the reception is over. A last general _pan! pan! pan!_ the little pipes are stowed away into their chased sheaths, tied up in the sashes, and the mousmés rise to depart. They light, at the end of short sticks, a quantity of red, gray or blue lanterns, and after a series of endless bows and curtseys, the guests disperse themselves in the darkness of the lanes and trees. We also go down to the town,--Yves, Chrysanthème, Oyouki, and myself,--in order to conduct my mother-in-law, sisters-in-law, and youthful aunt, Madame Nénufar, to their house. We want to take one last stroll together in our old familiar pleasure haunts, drink one more iced sherbet at the house of the _Indescribable Butterflies_, buy one more lantern at Madame Très-Propre's, and eat some parting waffles at Madame L'Heure's! I try to be affected, moved, by this leave-taking, but without success. In this Japan, as with the little men and women who inhabit it, there is something decidedly wanting; pleasant enough as a mere pastime, it begets no feeling of attachment. On our return, when I am once more with Yves and the two mousmés climbing up the road to Diou-djen-dji, which I shall probably never see again, a vague feeling of melancholy pervades my last stroll. It is, however, but the melancholy inseparable from all things that are about to end without possibility of return. Moreover, this calm and splendid summer is also drawing to a close for us,--since to-morrow we shall go forth to meet the autumn, in Northern China. I am beginning, alas! to count the youthful summers I may still hope for; I feel more gloomy each time another fades away, and flies to rejoin the others already disappeared in the dark and bottomless abyss, where all past things lie buried. At midnight we return home, and my removal begins; while on board the _amazingly tall friend_ kindly takes my watch. It is a nocturnal, rapid, stealthy removal,--_"dorobo_ (thieves) fashion" remarks Yves, who in frequenting the mousmés has picked up a smattering of the Niponese language.