When all my commissions are finished, he puts up his little vehicle under a tree, and much touched by my departure, insists upon escorting me on board the Triomphante, to watch over my final purchases in the sampan which conveys me to the ship, and to see them himself safely into my cabin.
His, indeed, is the only hand I clasp with a really friendly feeling, without a suppressed smile, on quitting this Japan.
No doubt, in this country as in many others, there is more honest friendship and less ugliness among the simple beings devoted to purely physical work.
At five o'clock in the afternoon we set sail.
Along the line of the shore are two or three sampans; in them the mousmés, shut up in the narrow cabins, peep at us through the tiny windows, half hiding their faces on account of the sailors; these are our wives, who have wished, out of politeness, to look upon us once more.
There are other sampans as well, in which other Japanese women are also watching our departure. These stand upright, under great parasols decorated with big black letters and daubed over with clouds of varied and startling colors.
We move slowly out of the great green bay. The groups of women become lost in the distance. The country of round and thousand-ribbed umbrellas fades gradually from our sight.
Now the great sea opens before us, immense, colorless, solitary; a solemn repose after so much that was too ingenious and too small.
The wooded mountains, the charming capes disappear. And Japan remains faithful to itself in its last picturesque rocks, its quaint islands on which the trees tastefully arrange themselves in groups—studied perhaps, but charmingly pretty.