The train had stopped at a suburb and guards went by proclaiming its name in a musical guttural, their voices dwelling insistently on the long-drawn, last syllable. The next carriage was a third-class one with bare floors and wooden benches, set crosswise. Through the opened door Barbara could see its crowd of brown faces, keen and saturnine. On its front seat a heavy-featured, lumpish coolie woman was nursing a three-year-old baby, holding it to her bared breast with red and roughened hands. Just outside the station's white-washed fence, a clump of factory chimneys spouted pitchy smoke into the dimming sky, and the descending sun glistened from a monster gas-tank. Farther away, beyond clipped hedges, lay thatched roofs, looking as soft as mole-skin, with wild flowers growing on the ridges, and bamboo clumps soaring above them, like pale green ostrich-feathers yellow at the tips. Through the open window came the treble note of a girl singing. A man passed hastily through the carriage leaving a trail of small pamphlets bound in green paper with gold lettering--an advertisement of a health resort, printed in English for the tourist. Barbara opened one curiously. She looked up with a merry eye. "Here's a paragraph for you, Uncle Arthur," she said. "Listen: "'This place has other modern monuments, first and second-class hotels and many sea-scapes. In one quarter are a number of missionaries, but they can easily be avoided.'" "Do let us credit that to difficulties of the language," he protested. "I'm sure that must have been meant complimentarily." "But what a contradiction!" put in Patricia wickedly. "Well," he retorted. "My baker has a sign on his wagon, 'The biggest loafer in Tokyo.' He means that well, too." A shrill whistle, a slamming of doors, and now the gray roofs fell away. On one side the steel road all but dipped in the bay. Wild ducks drew startled wakes across the rippleless lagoon. On a sand-bar a flock of gray and white gulls disported, looking at a distance like pied bathers; and about an anchored fishing boat, a dozen naked urchins were splashing with shrill cries. Far across the inlet, hazy, vapory, visionary, Barbara could make out a farther shore, an outline in violets and opalines, coifed with lilac cloud, and in the mid-azure a high-pooped _junk_ swam by, a shape of misty gold, palely drawn in wan, blue light. On the other side the train was rounding grassy hills, terraced to the very tops. Laid against their steep sides, or standing upright on wooden framework, were occasional huge advertisements in red or white--Chinese characters or pictures--while flowering camelia trees and small green-yellow shrubs drew lengthening blue shadows. A high tressle spanned acres of orchard where continuous trellis made a carpet of growing fruit, across which Barbara saw far away the bold outline of bluish hills.