"That is for the Emperor and his suite. The big sixteen-petaled chrysanthemum on its front is the Imperial Crest; no one else is allowed to use or carry it. The men on horseback are Princes of the Blood. Almost all the great generals of the late war are in that group behind them. The man smoking a cigarette is the Japanese Minister of War." "But when do the troops come?" Barbara inquired. "I see only one little company out there in the center." "That is a band," he said. "Look farther. Can you make out something like a wide, brown ribbon stretched all around the field?" She looked. The far-away, moveless, dun-colored strip merged with the sere plain, but now, here and there, she saw minute needle points of sunlight twinkle across it. She made an exclamation. For the tiny flashes were sun-gleams from the bayonets of massed men, clad in neutral-tinted khaki, silent, motionless as a brown wall, a living river frozen to utter immobility by a word of command that had been spoken two long hours before. A mounted _aide_ galloped wildly past toward the purple canopy. As he flashed by, a thin bugle-note rang out and a band far back by the gate at which they had entered began playing a minor melody. Strange, slow, infinitely solemn and sad, the strain rolled around the hushed field--the _Kimi-ga-yo_, the "Hymn of the Sovereign," adapted by a German melodist a score of years ago, which in Japan is played only in the Imperial Presence or that of its outward and visible tokens. The counterpoint, with its muttering roll of snare-drums on the long chords, and sudden, sharp clashes of cymbals, gave the majestic air an effect weird and unforgetable. The strain sank to silence, but with the last note a second nearer band caught it up and repeated it; then, nearer still, another and another. Barbara, leaning, saw a great state-coach of green and gold coming down the field. It was drawn by four of the most beautiful bay horses she had ever seen. Coachman, postilions and footmen wore red coats heavily frogged with gold, white cloth breeches and block enamel top-boots. As it came briskly along that animate wall of spectators, the vast concourse, save for the welling or ebbing minor of the bands, was silent, hushed as in a cathedral. But as it passed, the packed sea of brown faces--the mass of _kimono_ next the gate and the ranks of splendid uniforms--bent forward as one man, in a great sighing rustle, like a field of tall grass when a sudden wind passes over it. The plumed hats of the diplomatists came off; they bowed low. The ladies courtesied, and Barbara, as her gaze lifted, caught an instant's glimpse, through the coach's glass sides, of that kingly figure, heaven-descended and sacred, mysterious alike to his own subjects as to the outside world, through whom flows to the soul of modern Japan the manifest divinity and living guidance of cohorts of dead Emperors stretching backward into the night of Time! * * * * *