Down below in the streets of the town the lights of art are paling in that of Nature’s lantern. The harbour is a huge replica of the glass of frosted silver I bought last week in a curio-shop for twenty _yen_. The ships at anchor are mere spectres, narrow lines of ink, some of them with dots of light along their sides; the shadow of the hills, over which the moon peeps with cold, white face, just the breath on the glass as when a woman looks too closely into it.
The sounds of singing and dancing appear fewer now it is less sombre. Why does darkness exaggerate noise?
A steamer is going out; it is the mail, a thin thing like the match P. and O. boats I often swam in a bowl when a boy—the lights of her saloon mere glow-worms at this distance. But my companion must have seen all this many times before. Of course he has. And being more interested just now in “teal-duck” than the night side of Nature, he vanishes through the opened doorway, and I hear him drumming with his stockinged heel upon the floor to summon the mousmé.
“_Ayakou!_” sings out Kotmasu, who has sung “Hi! hi!” till there came an answering voice from below.
I leave my post on the verandah and enter the room, and along the passage at the back comes the sound of a mousmé pattering barefoot, her quick, short steps making a gentle thud, thud on the matting.
The panel door is thrust aside, and our attendant enters with a bow, and many ingenious excuses for the delay.
Kotmasu and I are seated; and on the floor before us our attendant mousmé places a wonderful bowl of seaweed soup—a dainty thing with sprays of chrysanthemums adorning its china-blue sides, the white-blue that you see in the eyes. To this soup I am used, and also to beans enshrined in sugar, and little fish equally astray from their proper element; but to the live fish, quivering its last quiver, perhaps, I cannot become accustomed, and even to watch Kotmasu—humane man in ordinary—placing the chop-stick impaled morsels in his mouth is almost too much for my still Western stomach. Of the “teal duck” and prawns I partake largely, making the mousmé laugh—so infectious are the emotions in this land of make-believe—by pretending to swallow the latter whole. I am not yet quite used to the chop-sticks, and occasionally fail ludicrously to spit my morsels, making both my companion and the mousmé roar, the latter clapping her pretty small hands with delight. But I am not annoyed; I have yet to see the foreigner who handles these strange implements better.