Anything more curious in the shape of a street vista than the view looking down one of these waterways can scarcely be found in Japan. Still as a mirror surface, the canal flows between high stone embankments supporting the houses,--houses of two or three stories, all sparred out from the stonework so that their facades bodily overhang the water. They are huddled together in a way suggesting, pressure from behind; and this appearance of squeezing and crowding is strengthened by the absence of regularity in design,--no house being exactly like another, but all having an indefinable Far-Eastern queerness,--a sort of racial character,--that gives the sensation of the very-far-away in place and time. They push out funny little galleries with balustrades; barred, projecting, glassless windows with elfish balconies under them, and rooflets over them like eyebrows; tiers of tiled and, tilted awnings; and great eaves which, in certain hours, throw shadows down to the

foundation. As most of the timber-work is dark,--either with age or staining,--the shadows look deeper than they really are. Within them you catch glimpses of balcony pillars, bamboo ladders from gallery to gallery, polished angles of joinery,--all kinds of jutting things. At intervals you can see mattings hanging out, and curtains of split bamboo, and cotton hangings with big white ideographs upon them; and all this is faithfully repeated upside down in the water. The colors ought to delight an artist,--umbers and chocolates and chestnut-browns of old polished timber; warm yellows of mattings and bamboo screens; creamy tones of stuccoed surfaces; cool greys of tiling. . . . The last such vista I saw was bewitched by a spring haze. It was early morning. Two hundred yards from the bridge on which I stood, the house fronts began to turn blue; farther on, they were transparently vapory; and yet farther, they seemed to melt away suddenly into the light,--a procession of dreams. I watched the progress of a boat propelled by a peasant in straw hat and straw coat,--like the peasants of the old picture-books. Boat and man turned bright blue and

then grey, and then, before my eyes,--glided into Nirvana. The notion of immateriality so created by that luminous haze was supported by the absence of sound; for these canal-streets are as silent as the streets of shops are noisy.