The dinner lasts till ten o'clock. At this moment the actor and
actress, who had retired during dessert, made their entry, one in a
coachman's overcoat, the other in a nurse's jacket, and they gave us
the _Sonnettes_ with an energy, a go, a dash--well, it would only be
fair to them if Claretie, on the recommendation of Meilhac and Halevy,
offers to put them on the pension list of the Comedie Francaise.
At midnight the festival is over. We all retire to our sleeping places.
We do not even hear them shouting the names of the stations before we
come to Kan-Tcheou, and it is between four and five o'clock in the
morning that a halt of forty minutes retains us at the station of that
town.
The country is changing as the railway runs south of the fortieth
degree, so as to skirt the eastern base of the Nan Shan mountains. The
desert gradually disappears, villages are not so few, the density of
the population increases. Instead of sandy flats, we get verdant
plains, and even rice fields, for the neighboring mountains spread
their abundant streams over these high regions of the Celestial Empire.
We do not complain of this change after the dreariness of the Kara-Koum
and the solitude of Gobi.
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