Making their way along the platform, crowded with Japanese, mostly in native dress, and filled with the aroma of cigarettes and the thin ringing of innumerable wooden clogs on stone flags, Barbara was conscious for the first time of a studious surveillance. A young Japanese passed her carrying his bent and wizened mother on his back; the old woman, clutching him tightly about the neck, turned her shaven head to watch. Children in startling rainbow tinted _kimono_ stared from the platform with round, serious eyes. A peasant woman, with teeth brilliantly blackened, peered from a car window, and a group of young men turned bodily and regarded her with gravely observant gaze, in a prolonged, unwinking scrutiny that seemed as innocent of courtesy as of any intent to offend. In European cities she had felt the gaze of other races, but this was different. It was not the curious study of a phenomenon, of an enduring puzzle of far origins, nor the expression of the ignorant, vacantly amused by what they do not understand; it was a deeper look of inner placidity, that held no wonder and no awe, and somehow suggested thoughts as ancient as the world. A curious sense began to possess Barbara of having left behind her all familiar every-day things, of being face to face with some new wonder, some brooding mystery which she could not grasp. They entered the car just behind an ample lady who had been among the ship's passengers--a good-natured, voluble Cook's tourist who, the second day out, had confided to Barbara her certainty of an invitation to the Imperial Cherry-Blossom party, as her husband had "a friend in the litigation." She wore a painted-muslin, and the husband of influential acquaintance and substantial, red-bearded person showed now a gleaming expanse of white waistcoat crossed by a gold watch-chain that might have restrained a tiger. The lady nodded and smiled beamingly. "Isn't it all perfectly splendid!" she cried. "There was a baby on the platform that was too _sweet_!--for all the world like the Japanese dolls we buy at home, with their hair shingled and a little round spot shaved right in the crown! My husband tried to give it a silver dollar, but the mother just smiled and bowed and went away and left it lying on the bench." She found a seat and fanned herself vigorously with a handkerchief. "I just thought I never _would_ get through that car door," she added. "It's only two feet across!" The road was narrow gage and the seats ran the length of the car on either side. Hardly had its occupants settled themselves when, to the shrill piping of a horn, the train started. "Goodness, this is a relief!" sighed Patricia, as the bishop opened the first Japanese newspaper he had seen for many months. "I hate _rick'sha_--they're such unsociable things! I haven't said ten words to you, Barbara, and I've got oceans to talk about. But I'll be merciful till I get you home. What a good-looking youth that is in the corner!"