Many features of that voyage supplied “atmosphere” which Nathan will never forget. Laughing forenoons swashing through shimmering waves; schools of flying fish winging low above the whitecaps like dragon flies, to flip from sight as one watched them; children playing on the after-deck and a kiddie-car always left for peripatetics to stumble over; soft sea breezes wafting through velvet-covered saloons; a wisp of smoke on the far horizon where another steamer passed; the sun going aslant down the sky and making a shadow ship that sailed into flaming carmine with them; nights of laughter and music; dancing under Japanese lanterns; the close, hot confines of narrow white stateroom passages faintly scented with bilge,—one grows to love a ship which has carried one in safety over thousands of watery miles. And his father had known all this, three years before. His first sight of Japan came about eleven o’clock the morning of the seventeenth day at sea. A hatless young missionary in white duck, China bound, came around the southern side of the promenade deck with field-glass case swinging from one shoulder. “Japan ahead!” he cried. “Just sighted Fujiyama!” Then Nathan noted that the deck where he had been reading was deserted. On the opposite side of the ship, up forward, passengers were telescoped against the rail. It was some time before Nathan discerned the great, weird, snow-white cone, high and vague in the clouds, guarding the portals of the East, though no shore was visible yet. But the shore loomed quickly after that, though the mountain outline faded. During lunch he glanced through the dining-room port-holes to see low, sandy coast slipping past on the north, as though the liner had entered an inland river. A chalk-white lighthouse on which the sun dazzled—gray, jagged cliffs against the northern horizon—boats hugging the beach; they were at the mouth of Tokio Bay. They would dock at Yokohama late that afternoon. And when the vessel veered sharply northward, in the ensuing two-hour ride up that bay, with the smoke pall of Yokohama hanging in the sky ahead and weird, thatched-cottage, dwarf-pine, deep-bowered shores gliding away on east and west, the man’s heart beat with pardonable excitement. In a handful of hours he might meet his father. It would be a dramatic meeting, not without a trace of pride on the part of the son. It was a wonderful ride up to Yokohama. The sunshine was dazzling. The mazarine water was a-shimmer with whitecaps and spectrums. A bizarre touch was given that seascape by scores of _sampans_, native fishing boats, with long rudders and leg-o’-mutton sails, that worked so close to the incoming leviathan as to disclose their contents,—fish poles, nets, discarded clothing, coils of rope.