mind a good dose of fishing, to be taken as suited the day. So I
betook me down a by-street, where the aerial carp promised the
thickest, and, selecting a house well placed for a view, asked
permission to mount upon the roof. It chanced to be a cast-off
clothing shop, along whose front some fine, if aged, garments were
hung to catch the public eye. The camera and I were inducted up the
ascent by the owner, while my boots, of course, waited dog-like in
the porch below.

The city made a spectacle from above. On all sides superb paper carp
floated to the breeze, tugging at the strings that held them to the
poles quite after the manner of the real fish. One felt as though,
by accident, he had stepped into some mammoth globe of goldfish.
The whole sky was alive with them. Eighty square miles of finny folk
inside the city, and an untold company without. The counterfeit
presentments were from five to ten feet long, and painted to mimic
life. The breeze entered at the mouth and passed out somewhat less
freely at the tail, thus keeping them well bellied and constantly in
motion. The way they rose and dove and turned and wriggled was
worthy of free will. Indeed, they had every look of spontaneity,
and lacked only the thing itself to turn the sky into an ocean,
and Tokyo into a sea bottom with a rockery of roof. Each fish
commemorates the birth of a boy during the year. It would thus be
possible to take a census of the increase of the male population
yearly, at the trifling cost of scaling a housetop,--a set of
statistics not without an eventual value.

While we were strolling back, Yejiro and I, we came, in the way,
upon another species of fish. The bait, which was well designed to
captivate, bade for the moment to exceed even the angler's