isit Tokyo,--with fury often, sometimes with destruction.
Earthquakes cow it; snow falls upon its temple roofs, swings in wet,
dazzling masses from the bamboo plumes, or balances in white strata
along green-black pine branches. The summer sun scorches the face of
Yeddo, and summer rain comes down in wide bands of light. With evening
the mist creeps up, thrown over it like a covering, casting a spell of
silence through which the yellow lanterns of the hurrying jinrikishas
dance an elfish dance, and the voices of the singing-girls pierce like
fine blades of sound.

But to know the full charm of the great city, one must wake with it at
some rebirth of dawn. This hour gives to the imaginative in every land
a thrill, a yearning, and a pang of visual regeneration. In no place
is this wonder more deeply touched with mystery than in modern Tokyo.

Far off to the east the Sumida River lies in sleep. Beyond it, temple
roofs--black keels of sunken vessels--cut a sky still powdered thick
with stars. Nothing moves, and yet a something changes! The darkness
shivers as to a cold touch. A pallid haze breathes wanly on the
surface of the impassive sky. The gold deepens swiftly and turns to a
faint rose flush. The stars scamper away like mice.

Across the moor of gray house eaves the mist wavers. Day troubles it.
A pink light rises to the zenith, and the mist shifts and slips away in
layers, pink and gold and white. Now far beyond the grayness, to the
west, the cone of Fuji flashes into splendor. It, too, is pink. Its
shape is of a lotos bud, and the long fissures that plough a mountain
side are now but delicate gold veining on a petal. Slowly it seems to
open. It is the chalice of a new day, the signal and the pledge of
consecration. Husky crows awake in the pine trees, and doves under the
temple eaves. The east is red beyond the river, and the round, red
sun, insignia of this land, soars up like a cry of triumph.

On the glittering road of the Sumida, loaded barges, covered for the
night with huge squares of fringed straw mats, begin to nod and preen
themselves like a covey of gigantic river birds. Sounds of prayer and
of silver matin bells come from the temples, where priest and acolyte
greet the Lord Buddha of a new day. From tiny chimneyless kitchens of
a thousand homes thin blue feathers of smoke make slow upward progress,
to be lost in the last echoes of the vanishing mist. Sparrows begin to
chirp, first on