"I, too, remember the first engines," said the father. "Many were the honorably strange sights that went with them. One morning a man took off his clogs at this admirable station and set them with worthy care upon the platform before he entered the train. It was his peaceful expectation to find them waiting for him when he left the train in Yokohama." At that moment an engine came puffing down the track, and soon they were all seated in one of the open cars and gliding swiftly out of the city. The children pointed out to each other the lotus blossoms in the moats, the little boats in the canal and the freight boats on the Sumida river. The father and mother talked about the tea-farms and the fields of rice and millet through which they were passing. Many crows flew cawing over the heads of men and women who were working in the deep mud of the rice fields. "Pretty birds!" called Baby San. "She means the white herons," said Tara. Dozens of the long-legged herons were stalking about in the muddy fields near the track; and farther away, many pieces of white paper fluttered from strings which were stretched across the fields of rice. Yuki San saw no difference between the birds and the fluttering bits of white paper. "Those small white ones scare the unworthy crows away, little flower Sister," explained Tara; but the baby sister shook her head and said, "No, pretty birds!" Umé turned the baby's head gently away from the fluttering scarecrows. "Look at the pretty flowers," she said. Beautiful lotus blossoms were growing in the muddy ditches beside the track. The baby bobbed her head to them and begged them to stand still, but they all hurried past the hands she held out to them. "The lotus is Buddha's flower," said O Ba San. "It grows out of the dirt and slime to give us blossoms of rare beauty. Such may be the growth of our hearts if we choke not their good impulses." "It is a long way from Buddha's flower to his mountain," said Umé, as she looked off to where Fuji rose in the distance. "Is it true," asked Tara, "that on the days when we cannot see the mountain through the mist, it is because it has gone on a visit to the gardens of the gods?" "That is what I always thought when I was a child," his grandmother answered. "And do many pilgrims every year climb the long way up its steep sides to the top?" "Yes, my child." "And must I also climb to the top some day, if I wish to please the gods?" "Yes, unless the gods should honorably please to take away your power to climb." "Oh," gasped Umé, "I hope the gods will never do that!" She looked anxiously at her feet and said, "I hope they will never need my feet for anything. So unworthily short a time have I used them, that they cannot be fit for the gods." "Let your use of them be always in the service of the gods, and the more honorably old they grow, the more favor will they find in the sight of the gods," answered her grandmother.