The children were glad to stand on the platform, watching the throngs of people and seeing the interesting sights. Newsboys were running everywhere calling their papers; strangely-dressed foreigners were hiring jinrikisha-runners to take them over the city; a police sergeant was walking up and down; and electric cars were bringing passengers to the station with much ringing of bells and clanging of gongs.
"I fear Yuki-ko will not like her first ride in a train," said Umé, as the child hid her face in her mother's kimono at the sight of a big engine.
"I well remember my first sight of an engine," said the grandmother. "When I was a little girl there was not a railroad track in all Japan. When the first trains ran through the country, the peasant women thought the engines were horrible demons, and ran screaming away from the puffing and hissing."
"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.