produce a distinctly dreary effect. The old ramparts, planted with pine-trees, which surrounded most of them, are still standing, and one, embracing the immense park of the Imperial Palace, is used as a public promenade. As you walk along it, and look towards the palace itself, it is difficult to believe that you are in Japan, everything is so very European, and on the other side the waste land contains a perfect forest of telegraph and telephone poles, which affirms, and very forcibly, too, that our civilization is distinctly the reverse of picturesque. Telephones, telegraph, electric light, gas, petroleum lamps, etc., are now as plentifully used in Tokio as they are in any English or American town. It is most amusing to notice as you pass along the streets, when the paper screens which form the façade of most of the houses are removed, the artisans seated at their _tatamis_, working by the light of an Edison lamp. When they cannot afford electricity or gas, the Japanese use petroleum exclusively, but not without some considerable risk to the safety of a city entirely built of wood. Since a Japanese house contains next door to nothing in the way of furniture, and that even in the houses of the rich all valuable objects of art are usually kept in an iron safe, and only exposed on state occasions, a fire does not matter so much as it would in a London mansion or a Chicago ‘sky-scraper.’ A few cushions, coverlets, and household utensils, which are to be found in every house, are soon put outside the doors, so that the inhabitants have very little to fear, for their house is only one story high, and the whole façade consists of paper screens, which slide into one another when required. The only people who really have anything to fear from fire are the retail merchants, whose shops, of course, are well stocked. Fires are of very constant occurrence, and people are not at all surprised to wake up in the morning to hear that some hundred houses have been burnt down during the night.