The city through its girdle of brown streets works hard, its wharfs and factories, its shops and warehouses are dense with human life and resonant with human labour. The low brown streets so thick with flimsy paper houses stretch for ten miles along the plain. In them the children play, the _kuruma_ pass quickly, the heavy laden hand-carts of the coolies push and jostle, but the heart of this great capital lies still. From circumference to centre as you come, through street on street of houses, wharves and shops, the magic of the city grows. First the streets space out and out, then the houses dwindle as the trees and gardens grow, greener, wilder, stiller, till the heart of Tokyo’s city is a moated park of peace. Up nine steep hills the city spreads, and sea and river, and the wide green rice-fields lap it round, while far away across the land, above the level blue of sky great Fuji rises peerless in the midmost heaven. Engirdled by the thronged and busy streets the nine tall hills peaceful with well-kept houses and secluded gardens, make a crescent round the moated park. For in this strange city whose centre is a palace and a peaceful walled-in pleasaunce the “suburbs” lie within and not without the town. And through the town and over street and roadway, in the gardens and the courtyards the gaunt beaked crows flap coal-black wings as they sail past, and their cynical “Haw, haw” is sarcastic with an utter disbelief. With stately swoop, black wings outspread, they drift past the ear of the newcomer confident with a three weeks’ visit that he understands the East, and in the midst of his cocksureness they drop their cold, sarcastic “Haw.” Brown and so crowded are the streets, bewildering with their jostle of blue-clad men and women, their open stalls, their unmade roads of earth stretching flat between the houses on each side, where man-drawn carts, and _kuruma_, passengers, and children get in each other’s way. The white uniformed policeman, sword on thigh, stands, a bronze statue, at each busy corner, and to him even the criminal is polite. And down the streets and through and through the town, cut straight or winding, the brown canals, valleys of black mud, or slow streams of dark water, run to the river and the sea. And thousands upon thousands, too, seem the bridges, some flat and narrow as gangways, most arched in a crescent curve, and the brown canals run from the sea and from the river far within the town.