Hearing this, the Dragon King bowed his farewell and departed in tears. Before he knew it, the red sun had sunk in the west and the moon-star had risen. There was to be seen:

拜辭 is to take leave with a bow, and 太陰星, 'the great-yin star,' is the moon. 但見, 'there was to be seen,' is the storyteller's cue that a set-piece of description is coming.

Mist congeals, the hills turn purple, and the homing crows are weary; travelers on the long road put up at the wayside inns.

煙凝 is mist gathering and thickening. 歸鴉倦, the homing crows worn out, and 投旅店, travelers putting up at an inn, fix the hour as the one when every living thing is heading somewhere to sleep — which the dragon, tonight, is not.

At the ferry-head new-come geese roost on the sandbar; the River of Stars appears; the watch-tallies hasten; in the lonely village the lamp-fires burn without a flame.

汀沙 is a sandy shoal and 銀河, 'the silver river,' is the Milky Way. 更籌 is the watch-tally, the marker for the night-watches into which the dark hours were divided, with 更 read gēng; 光無焰, 'light without flame,' is the dim steady glow of distant lamps.

The wind curls the censer-smoke through the quiet Daoist cloister; in the butterfly dream, the sleeper is nowhere to be seen.

風裊 is the wind wafting something along. And then the image that quietly announces what this chapter is: the 蝴蝶夢, the butterfly dream, in which Zhuāngzǐ dreamed he was a butterfly and woke unable to say whether he was a man who had dreamed a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming a man. Within a few pages a sleeping man will kill a dragon.

The moon shifts the flower-shadows up the balustrade; the starlight scatters, the water-clock's note changes, and unawares the deep of night is already half spent.

漏聲 is the dripping of the water-clock, and 換, 'changes,' marks the turn from one hour to the next. The lyric closes at midnight, which is precisely the hour the doomed dragon has picked for his appeal.