Big Stone Gap, Virginia.

FOLLOWING THE SUN-FLAG

THE TRAIL OF THE SAXON

An amphitheatre of feathery clouds ran half around the horizon and close to the water's edge; midway and toward Russia rose a great dark shadow through which the sun shone faintly. Such was the celestial setting for the entrance of a certain ship some ten days since at sunset into the harbor of Yokohama and the Land of the Rising Sun; but no man was to guess from the strange pictures, strange people, and jumbled mass of new ideas and impressions waiting to make his brain dizzy on shore, that the big cloud aloft was the symbol of actual war. No sign was to come, by night or by day, from the tiled roofs, latticed windows, paper houses, the foreign architectural monstrosities of wood and stone; the lights, lanterns, shops—tiny and brilliantly lit; the innumerable rickshas, the swift play under them of muscular bare brown legs which bore thin-chested men who run open-mouthed and smoke cigarettes while waiting a fare; the musical chorus of getas clicking on stone, mounted by men bareheaded or in billycock hats; little women in kimonos; ponies with big bellies, apex rumps, bushy forelocks and mean eyes; rows of painted dolls caged behind barred windows and under the glare of electric lights—expectant, waiting, patient—hour by hour, night after night, no suggestion save perhaps in their idle patience; coolies with push carts, staggering under heavy loads, "cargadores" in straw hats and rain coats of rushes, looking for all the world like walking little haycocks—no sign except in flags, the red sunbursts of Japan, along now and then with the Stars and Stripes—flags which, for all else one could know, might have been hung out for a holiday.

For more than a month I had been on the trail of the Saxon, the westward trail on which he set his feet more than a hundred years ago, when he cut the apron-strings of Mother England, turned his back on her, and, without knowing it, started back toward her the other way round the world, to clasp hands, perhaps, again across the Far East. Where he started, I started, too, from the top of the Cumberland over which he first saw the Star of Empire beckoning westward only. I went through a black tunnel straight under the trail his moccasined feet wore over Cumberland Gap, and stopped, for a moment, in a sleeper on the spot where he pitched his sunset camp for the night; and the blood of his footprints still was there.