Yokohama’s smoke drew closer. It was ten minutes of five and the sun was beginning to sink over the city’s western hills, when the mighty engines stopped at last and the soul of the ship delivered her bulk to fretty little tugs that finally worked her up against her dock. The pilings creaked with the shock. The hawsers tightened. The voyage was ended. Nathan had reached Japan! As a dozen half-naked coolies pulled and groaned and jabbered and cried, getting the high gang-plank raised, handkerchiefs waved on the dock. Friends recognized friends. Relatives called joyously to relatives. The bulk of the crowd on shore were Japanese,—ludicrous old men in black nightshirts and wooden sandals, heads shaded with cheap straw hats, baggy umbrellas clutched by their middles; somber-clad, high-coiffured Japanese women surrounded by slathers of babies; here and there the figure of a “foreigner” in pongee, a white face anxiously seeking the lines of humans high above, along the rail. Nathan looked for his father. At any moment he might meet him. He eventually descended the gang-plank stairs, down into the seething, joyous, jabbering, gesticulating mob, in through the long, shadowed dock-house, out into a circular front yard where bowler-hatted rickshaw men sat on the shafts of their vehicles and waited for fares, beckoning and honking now frantically. Nathan stored his bags in one vehicle and stepped up into another. The lean, sweating, diminutive draysters received instructions; shafts were raised; the high-wheeled, rubber-tired little carriages crunched away over powdered trap-rock, out into a hard gravel street, fresh sprinkled, off toward the hotel in the cool of that wonderful afternoon. Japan! Spotless streets flanked by high stucco walls or buildings with shuttered windows—a bit of old London, somehow—a group of boys in gingham playing ball—half a dozen in “bathing suits” riding bicycles, despite clumsy wooden sandals—rickshaws trotting noiselessly in groups of two or three, the sinking sun glinting on bright steel-wire wheel spokes—a street corner with a far vista of tiny dragon-scrolled shops—three nude men washing after their day’s labors at a public horse trough. Southward along The Bund the rickshaws rolled along the side of quiet Tokio Bay, in the sunset; then came the long, low, red front and cool porticos of The Grand Hotel—much confusion about procuring Japanese money to pay the _kuruma_ men. The sea trip was ended. Nathan looked around the big lobby. Any one might suddenly turn out to be his father. But he saw no Johnathan. Nathan followed the Japanese boy upstairs to his room,—a great airy chamber facing the east and—home! He forgot his father temporarily in the ensuing irritations of Chinese tradesmen continually knocking at his door,—pongee suit-makers, boot-makers, guides for the city in the day and week following. He liked Japan. III