The road ran high along the river on a green embankment like a wide wall, between double rows of cherry-trees, whose branches interlocked overhead. It was densely crowded with people, each one of whom seemed to be carrying a colored paper-lantern or a cherry-branch drooped over the shoulder. In the hues of the loose, warm-weather _kimono_ bloomed all the flowers of all the springs--golds and mauves and scarlets and magentas--and everywhere in the lantern-light fluttered radiant-winged children, like vivid little birds in a tropical forest. From tiny one-storied tea-houses along the way, with elevated mats covered with red flannel blankets, _biwa_ and _koto_ and _samisen_ gurgled and fluted and tinkled. On the right the embankment descended steeply, giving a view of sunken roadways and tiled roofs; on the left lay the long reaches of the dreamy river murmuring with oars and voices and vibrating like a vast flood of gold and vermilion fireflies. Barbara had never imagined such a welter of movement and color. The soft flute-like voices, the slow shuffling of sandals on the dry earth, the pensive smiling faces, the pink flowers on every hand, made this different from any holiday crowd she had ever seen. It suggested a carnival of Venice orientalized, painted over and set blazing with Japanese necromancy. Here and there jugglers and top-spinners displayed their skill to staring spectators. A cluster of shaven-headed babies swarmed silently about a sweetmeat seller, and beside his push-cart a man clad like a gray-feathered hawk whistled discordantly on a bamboo reed and gyrated with a vacant grin on his pock-marked face. Where the crowd was less close men tricked out in girls' attire, with whitened, clown-like faces, turned somersaults, and through the thickest of the press a dejected, blaze-faced ox, whose nose and forehead were painted with spots of scarlet, slowly drew a two-storied scaffold on which was perched the god of spring--a plaster figure wreathed with flowers. The animal's ears were tickled by long tassels of bright green and red, and his look was one of patient boredom. The man who led him wore a short jerkin, and his bare legs, from thigh to knee, were tattooed in big, blue, graceful leaves. The greatest numbers surged about a large tent, outside of which waddled here and there mountains of men, their faces round as full moons, naked save for gaily colored aprons. The fat hung on their breasts in great creased folds like an overfed baby's, and in the lantern-light their flesh looked an unhealthy, mottled pink. Each wore his hair wound in a short queue, bent forward and tied in a stiff loop on the crown. As one of the vast hulks lumbered by, cooling his moon-face with a tiny fan, Daunt pointed him out to Barbara. "That is the famous Hitachiyama," he told her, "the champion wrestler of Japan." "How big he is!"