Riding with Patricia in the big victoria next day, its red-striped runner diving ahead, Barbara forgot her vague wonder at Haru's disappearance, as she felt the enchanted mystery of Tokyo creep further into her heart. They threaded the softly dreaming silence of the willow-bordered moat that clasps the Imperial grounds with a girdle of cloudy emerald, where the "Dragon Pines" of the great _Shogun Iyemits_ fling their craggy masses of olive-green down over the leaning walls to kiss the mirroring water--past many-roofed, Tartar-like watch-towers, cream-white on the blue, and through little parks with forests of thin straight-boled trees and placid lotos ponds seething with the dagger-blue flashings of dragon-flies, all woven together into a tapestry, lovely, remote, fantastic--like the projection of some dream-legend whose people lived a fairy story in a picture-book world. On this oriental background continually appeared quaint touches of the foreign and bizarre: a huge American straw hat, much befrilled and befeathered, on the head of a baby strapped to its mother's back, or a hideous boa of chenille like bunched caterpillars marring the delicate native neckwear of an exquisite _kimono_. On the slope of a hill they came on a motley crowd, which included a sprinkling of foreigners, gathered before the entrance of a temple yard, where a rough, improvised amphitheater had been erected. Patricia called to the driver, and he pulled up. "Fire-walk," said the _betto_. "Ontaké temple." From their elevated seat they could see white-robed and barefooted priests waving long-handled fans and wands topped with shaggy paper tassels over an area of red-hot cinders. Presently some of them strode calmly across the smoking mass. "They call that the 'Miracle of Kudan Hill,'" said Patricia. "They are making incantations to the god of water to come and drive out the god of fire. It's a _Shinto_ rite." A laugh rose from the spectators. The High Priest was inviting the foreigners to attempt the ordeal. "Look!" said Patricia. "There is the man who got the free lecture out of your uncle on the train--the man with the white waistcoat and the red beard. And there's 'Martha,' too. I do believe she's going to try it!" She was. Undeterred by the misgivings of the rest, the lady of the painted muslin calmly divested herself of shoes and stockings and marched across and back again. "There!" she said triumphantly. "I said I would, and I _did_! It may be a miracle, but my feet are simply _frying_!" The carriage rolled on across a section of busy trade. From a side street came the brassy blare of a phonograph. "What a baffling combination it is!" said Barbara. "Last night some of those people were at Mukojima, listening to dead little drums and squealing fifes, and to-night here is Damrosch and the _Intermezzo_."