Tokyo is therefore a great city; but the stranger who visits its streets for the first time usually gets an impression of an even greater populousness. For the streets are always in the evening teeming with young children; they are not gutter-snipes, but children of respectable parents, small tradesmen or private persons of slender means, who let them run about on the public road rather than romp in their narrow dwellings. But it is not the children alone who think they have a greater right of way over the roads than the public: for on summer evenings especially, men and women turn out of doors and walk about or sit on benches outside their houses. Shops are completely open and reveal the rooms within, so that whole families may be seen from the streets; and as most houses are of only one or two stories, people live for the most part on the ground-floor. Even in private residences of some pretensions, the thin wooden walls allow voices to be easily heard on warm days when the rooms are kept open. So that from the people he sees crowding the houses and the noises he hears on all sides, the stranger is often deceived into giving the city credit for a larger population than it actually possesses. [Illustration: A STREET IN YEDO. (FROM A PICTURE BY SETTAN, 1778–1843).] The streets themselves are worth notice. If the foreigner who comes to Japan expects to see in such a great capital the asphalt carriageway and paved sidewalk of his native country, he will be sadly disappointed, for Tokyo, with all its multitudinous thoroughfares, cannot boast even the boulevards and avenues of a European provincial town. In spite of the efforts of the Tokyo municipality, the streets are still narrow. Their total length is about six hundred miles, with a width ranging from one yard to fifty, the average being nine yards. It was decided twenty years ago to widen some three hundred miles of these roads, giving the largest a width of forty yards for carriageway with a footway on either side of six yards, and the smallest a carriageway of twelve yards and a footway one yard wide. The work is to be accomplished in ninety years. Improvements to this end are slowly going on. The fact is that the City Fathers missed a great opportunity in the early years of the new regime when, upon the desertion of the residences of the daimyo and other feudatories after the fall of the Shogunate, land could have been purchased for a song, for it went begging in the heart of the city at less than thirty yen an acre. Those who were wise enough to buy it have made big fortunes, for the same land now sells for a hundred thousand yen or more per acre. Now, however, the municipality cannot command sufficient funds to purchase the land needed for improvements along the streets proposed, but buys it up only when it is absolutely necessary to relieve the congestion of traffic; and elsewhere it waits patiently until a fire burns down the streets and clears the