As she stood there bathed in the sunlight, her hands dividing the curtains, Barbara made a gracious part of the glimmering setting. Her thick, ruddy hair sprang curling from her strongly modeled forehead, and fell about her white shoulders, a warm reddish mass against the delicately tinted curtain. There was a thoroughbred straightness in the lines of the tall figure, in the curve of the cheek and the round directness of the chin; and her eyes, bent on the lucent green, were the color of brown sea-water under sapphire cloud-shadows. From a circle of evergreens near the porte-cochère a white flag-pole rose high above the treetops. The stars-and-stripes floated from its halyards, for the day was the national holiday of an European power. In the hedges sparrows were twittering, and in a plum-tree a _uguisu_--the little Buddhist bird that calls the sacred name of the Sutras--was warbling his sweet, slow, solemn syllables: "_Ho-kek-yo! Ho-kek-yo!_" A gardener was sweeping the pink rain of cherry-petals from the paths with a twig broom, the long sleeves of his blue _kimono_ fluttering in the yellow sunshine, and in front of the servants' quarters a little girl in flapping sandals was skipping rope with a chenille fascinator. Beyond the wall of the compound Barbara could see the street, a low row of open shops. In one, a number of men and girls, sitting on flat mats, were making bamboo fans. At the corner stood a round well, from which a group of women, barefooted and with tucked-up clothing, were drawing water in unpainted wooden buckets with polished brass hoops, and beside it, under a dark blue awning, a man and woman were grinding rice in a hand-mill made of two heavy stone disks. A blue-and-white figured towel was bound about the woman's head against the fine white rice-dust. Above them, on a tiny portico, an old man, with the calm, benevolent face of a porcelain mandarin, was watering an unbelievably-twisted dwarf plum on which was a single bunch of blossoming. At the side of the street grew a gnarled _kiri_ tree, its shambling roots encroaching on the roadway. In their cleft was set a wooden _Shinto_ shrine with small piles of pebbles before it. From a distance, high and clear, she heard a strain of bugles from some squad of soldiers going to barracks, or perhaps to the parade-ground, where, she remembered, an Imperial Review of Troops was to be held that morning. Barbara started suddenly, to see on the lawn just below her window, a figure three feet high, with a round, cropped head, gazing at her from a solemn, inquiring countenance. He wore a much-worn but clean _kimono_, and his infantile toes clutched the thongs of clogs so large that his feet seemed to be set on spacious wooden platforms. The youngster bent double and staggeringly righted himself with a staccato "_O-hayo!_" Barbara gave an inarticulate gasp; in face of his somber dignity she did not dare to laugh. "How do you do?" she said. "Do you live here?"