The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1911-11-04
CHAPTER I.
WHERE THE DAY BEGINS.

,@ ARBARA leaned against the
 palpitant rail, the light air flaming her breeze cool cheek,
 her arteries beating like tiny drums, atune with the throb-throb- throb of the steel deck as the black ocean leviathan swept on toward it's harbor resting place.
 All that Japanese April day she had been in a state of tremulous excite ment. She had crept from her berth at dawn to see the hay sun come up in a Rosicrucian flush as weirdly soft as mirage, to strain her eyes for the first filmy feather of land.
 For Japan, every sight and sound of 1t, had been woven with the earliest imaginings of Barbara's orphaned life. Her father she had never seen. Her mother she remembered only as vague widowed figure. In Japan they two had met and had married, and aft CT single year her mother had re- turned to her own place and people broken hearted and alone. In the month of Ter return Barbara had been born. A year ago her aunt, to whom she owed the care of her young girl hood, had died, and Barbara had found herself at twenty three mistress of liberal fortune and of her own fu- lure. Japan had always exercised a potent spell over her imagination. She pictured it as land of strange glow ing trees, of queer costumes and weird, Fantastic buildings. More than all, it was the land of her mothers life TO- mance, where her father had loved and died There was one other tangible tie-her uncle. her mothers brother, was Episcopal bishop of Tokyo. He was returning, now from half years visit in America, and this fact, coupled with an invitation from Patricia Dan dridge, the daughter of the American ambassador, with whom Barbara had chummed one California winter, had constituted an opportunity wholly al- turing. So she found herself on this April day. the pallid Pacific fuming away behind her, gazing with kindling cheeks on that shadowy background vaguely intangible in the magical lim- pidity of the distance. The aching beauty of it stung Barbara with a tender intolerable pang.
 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. Its better than champagne! It's like pins and needles in the tips of your fingers! There's positively an odor in the air like camellias. And did any one ever see such cOlors?"
 Bishop Randolph was a bachelor, past middle age, ruddy and with eyes softened by habitual good humor. He was the son of rector of a rich Vir- ginian parish, which on his fathers 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 pr, ,ent voyage was a homeward one.
 Japan gets into the blood" he said musingly. II remember yet the first time saw the coast, twenty-five years ago. We watched it together-your father and I-just as we two are doing now.">
 She looked at him with sudden ca gerness, for of his own accord he had never before spoken to her of her dead father. The latter had always seemed q very real parsonage, but how little she knew about him! The aunt who had brought her up-her mothers sis ter-had never talked of him, and her uncle she had seen but twice since she lad been old enough to wonder But little by little. gleaning a fact here and there, she had constructed a slender history of him. It told of mingled blood, birthplace on a Mediterranean island and gypsy childhood. There was a thin sheaf of yellowed manu- script in her possession that had been left among her mothers scanty papers, a fragment of an old diary of his. Many leaves had been ruthlessly cut f-am 1t, but in the pages that were Ier5 she cad found bits of fiotsam, broken memory pictures of his own mother which had strangely touched her, of bitter youth in England and America overshadowed by the haunt ing fear of blindness, of quests to West Indian cities told in phrases that dripped liquid gold and sunshine. The voyage to Japan had been made on the same vessel that carried her uncle, and they two had thus become comrades. The latter had been an en- thusiastic young missionary, one of few chosen spirits sent to defend a far field easement thrown forward by the batteries of Ghristendom. His sister