Kameido lies on the far bank of the Sumidagawa, in a network of poor streets, for the left bank of the river, like the big island at its mouth, is denser with yards and factories than is the right. The streets are narrower, fuller of children and the noise of hammers and of wheels. Yet in this poor wage-working quarter the festivals of the plum-blossoms, the wistaria, and the peony are held. In all Japan there is no other flower _fête_ which in the least resembles a horticultural show except that of _Botan_, the tree-peony. For when the peony blooms, the little trees, large as dwarf rose-bushes, are placed on tiers inside a matted tent. There the resemblance ends. These plants are set each in a framework of space, and the colours are grouped and blended with the thought and the instinct of an artist. The flowers of the peony are as large as the largest chrysanthemum, larger than ours, but their petals are rich, made of satin where ours are of cotton, delicate, fragile, and sheeny. The colouring is soft and subdued, and the faint sweet scent which comes from them is like the dream of a rose. The colours are simple, white warming to cream, paling to snow, and all the tints of pale reds, deep reds, and crimsons. The matting which covers them is of pale yellow, but somehow the light, as it comes through it, touched perhaps by the flowers, is the light of a dream--as sunlight without heat, as moonlight warmed and living, a light that shimmers, holding colour fast within, yet fast asleep. To-day the light in that peony tent at Kameido remains to me as definite as the flowers, as distinct as the scent, as real and, in truth, more beautiful. It was as though one saw the radiance of an unknown, unmade jewel, light but not yet substance. * * * * * All this left bank of the river from Fukagawa to Eko-in is full of workmen and workshops, of small trades and smaller traders, and here in the month of May in the grounds of the temple raised to the memory of the hundred thousand citizens killed in the great fire of 1657, the yearly wrestling contests are held. The _Smō_, tall, broad, powerful men, many six feet high or more, who dress in large checked _kimono_ and wear their hair in the old-fashioned top-knot, are adored by the populace who come in thousands to see them. The little round platform of stamped earth sprinkled with sand, set in the midst of a huge amphitheatre of faces, shows small as a raft on the sea, and slight despite its purple trapping. The crowd, a Tokyo crowd in _kimono_ and foreign head-gear, cap, bowler, and felt hat, sit from morning until night, day in day out, for the three long weeks of the wrestling matches.