Page:My Japanese Wife.djvu/31

Rh sides, some round, some like two mortar-boards of college days which, had taken each other into partnership, some like elongated helmets of a Uhlan, and others like monstrous fishes, birds, or reptiles swimming and floating in ether, diffuse a soft, subdued light. A puff of air makes the whole lot swing to and fro so wildly, with a rustle of their paper emptiness, that Kotmasu and I are set wondering idly whether an immense lantern, meant to represent a gold-fish with vermilion fins and black vertebra, which is obviously troubled in its interior, will not flare up and hang, a blackened skeleton, amidst its gay companions.

A white cat flits ghost-like and silent-footed across the path and vanishes down it in answer to a dissonant call of its fellow, and in that moment the disaster happens. The gold-fish, which has regarded us with vacant vermilion-rimmed