Along the street, inside the stalls and out, the crowd was dense, cheerful, polite and contented. There was no pushing, no ill-humour, no fights, no drunkenness, nor one policeman. The people of Kyoto were enjoying themselves like well-bred guests in a ballroom, with the courtesy of self-control, and the self-abandoned pleasure of a child. The road with its shifting crowd, and the two long lines of brightly lighted buildings, covered with paper lanterns and cotton banners on bamboo poles, looked more like a “set” in a theatre than real houses in an out-of-doors street. Not a candle-flame quivered, not a banner stirred, and the long perspective of the arched bridge was still as a painted background. Down in the river, in the actual bed of the stream, were more lights, whole crowded restaurants afloat. Sitting on the tops of tables, whose four legs driven down into the sand brought them within six inches of the water, supper parties innumerable ate and talked; while the children, slipping off their _gheta_, paddled their feet in the stream. Even the little waitresses, as they ran from customer to customer, would leave the long polished gangways that led from tea-house to table, and take the shorter way through the water. Every one was eating, and every one was happy--shaved ice with sugar syrup, at two _sen_ a glass, or dishes of brown eels and rice at two _yen_, gratuitous tea or _bīru_ in thirty-_sen_ bottles. And with the summer night above, the water all around, the hundreds and hundreds of little tables floated on the water bright with _kimono_ and lanterns. The broad shallow backwater either side the bridge was full of them, and the gentle rushing of the actual river beyond the circle of bright light lent a sense of freshness to the shadows that they did not in themselves possess. Up on the bridge the crowd grew thicker, Theatre Street more full; the hairpin stalls were surrounded with women and little girls, buying long hairpins carved at the end, or ornamented with silk lanterns or flowers, or ingenious designs of tortoises made of shells, with legs that quivered realistically. And the velvet blackness lying above the streets and beyond the river was warm to feel.