“And the voice of the Hidden One replied—”
But what the Hidden One made answer, Leslie did not remember, for the artless story had lulled him to sleep.
CHAPTER XVIII
MOSTLY ABOUT FLOWERS
O Japan! Spring! Dawn! what an exquisite and roseate mystery surrounds the meeting of ye three!
Night, and the owls, and the ghosts, have vanished, day and the sparrows have come.
Up from Nagasaki rise the murmurs of life, mists are vanishing from the hills across the harbor, where the lateen sails of junks are rising to find the wind, and the sampans dart about like attenuated water-beetles.
The far, faint sound of a bugle from the man-of-war anchorage crosses the far, shrill crowing of a cock owned by Mr. Pinecape, the cobbler of Jinriksha Street—two rapiers of sound crossing each other in the now brilliant air. Then the noises of the day deepen, and the whirr of the cicala mixes with all sorts of faint domestic noises, a mélange from which the ear can pick out notes just as the eye points in an impressionist’s picture: the clatter of a pair of clogs, the call of a watercress seller, the clash of a tin pan dropped somewhere, and then cock-crow after cock-crow from far and near, some loud and defiant, others defiant enough but faint, as if coming through a pin-pole half a mile away.