In its flowing current one may see many types: Americans from the near-by Imperial Hotel, bristling with enthusiasm; earnest tourists with Murrays tucked in their armpits, doggedly "doing" the country; members of foreign Legations whirling in victorias; Chinamen, queued and decorously clad in flowered silk brocade; an occasional Korean with queerly shaped hat of woven horse-hair; over-dandified _O-sharé-Sama_--"high-collar" men, as the Tokyo phrase goes--in tweeds and yellow puttees; comfortable merchants and men of affairs in dull-colored _kimono_ and clogs; blue-clad workmen with the marks of their trades stamped in great red or white characters on their backs; sallow, bare-footed students with caps of _Waseda_ or the Imperial University; stolid and placid-faced Buddhist priests in _rick'sha_, en route to some temple funeral; soldiers in khaki with red- and yellow-striped trousers; coolies dragging carts; country people on excursions from thatched inland villages, clothed in common cloth and viewing the capital for the first time with indrawn breath and chattering exclamations; rich noblemen, beggars, idlers, guides--all are tributary to this river. When evening falls women and children predominate: bent old women with brightly blackened teeth; patient-faced mothers with babies on their backs toddling on clacking wooden _géta_; white-faced vermilion-lipped _geisha_ glimpsing by in _rick'sha_ to some tea-house entertainment; coolie women dressed like men, trudging in the roadway; girl-students peering into jewelers' windows; children clad like gaudy moths and butterflies, clattering hand in hand, or pursuing one another with shrill cries. Before the sun has well set lanterns begin to twinkle and glow above doorways--yellow electric bulbs in clusters, white acetylene globes, smoky oil lamps, and great red and white paper-lanterns lit by candles. As the violet of the dusk deepens to purple, these multiply till the vista is ablaze. Lines of colored lights in pink and lemon break out like air-flowers along upper stories of tea-houses, from whose interiors come the strumming of _biwa_ and the twang of _samisen_. On frail balconies, pricked out with yellow lanterns, dwarf pines or jars of growing azalea hang their masses of soft green or pink down over the passers-by. From open _shoji_ women lean, their _kimono_ parted, their rounded breasts bared to the cool night.