The land was wonderfully nearer now. The hills lay, a clear pile of washed grays and greens, with saffron tinted valleys between, wound in a haze of tender lilac. By imperceptible gradations this unfolded, caught sub-tones, ermine against umbers, of warmer red and flickering emerald, white glints of sun on surf like splashes of silver, till suddenly, spectral and perfect, above a cluster of peaks like purple gentians, glowed forth a phantom mountain, its golden wistaria cone inlaid in the deeper azure. It hung like an inverted morning-glory, mist and mother-of-pearl at the top, shading into porphyry veined with streaks of verd and jade--Fuji-San, the despair of painters, the birthplace of the ancient gods. The aching beauty of it stung Barbara with a tender, intolerable pang. The little fishing-villages that presently came into sight, tucked into the clefts of the shore, with gray dwellings, elfishly frail, climbing the green slope behind them--the growing rice in patches of cloudy gold on the hillsides--the bluish shadows of bamboo groves--all touched her with an incommunicable delight. A shadow fell beside her and she turned. It was her uncle. His clean-shaven face beamed at her over his clerical collar. "Isn't it glorious?" she breathed. "It's better than champagne! It's like pins and needles in the tips of your fingers! There's positively an odor in the air like camelias. And did any one ever see such colors?" She pointed to the shore dead-ahead, now a serrated background of deep tones, swimming in the infinite gold of the tropic afternoon. Bishop Randolph was a bachelor, past middle age, ruddy and with eyes softened by habitual good-humor. He was the son of a rector of a rich Virginian parish, which on his father's death had sent the son a unanimous call. He had answered, "No; my place is in Japan," without consciousness of sacrifice. For him, in the truest sense, the present voyage was a homeward one. "Japan gets into the blood," he said musingly. "I often think of the old lady who committed suicide at Nikko. She left a letter which said: 'By favor of the gods, I am too dishonorably old to hope to revisit this jewel-glorious spot, so I prefer augustly to remain here for ever!' I have had something of the same feeling, sometimes. I remember yet the first time I saw the coast. That was twenty-five years ago. We watched it together--your father and I--just as we two are doing now."