parks, the first days of travel in these old countries force the
over-crowding upon the attention as nothing else can. One feels that
the cities are greatly over-crowded with houses and shops, and these
with people and wares; that the country is over-crowded with fields
and the fields with crops; and that in Japan the over-crowding is
greatest of all in the cemeteries, gravestones almost touching and
markers for families literally in bundles at a grave, while round
about there may be no free country whatever, dwellings, gardens or
rice paddies contesting the tiny allotted areas too closely to leave
even foot-paths between.

Unless recently modified through foreign influence the streets of
villages and cities are narrow, as seen in Fig. 8, where however the
street is unusually broad. This is a village in the Hakone district
on a beautiful lake of the same name, where stands an Imperial
summer palace, seen near the center of the view on a hill across the
lake. The roofs of the houses here are typical of the neat, careful
thatching with rice straw, very generally adopted in place of tile
for the country villages throughout much of Japan. The shops and
stores, open full width directly upon the street, are filled to
overflowing, as seen in Fig. 9 and in Fig. 22.

In the canalized regions of China the country villages crowd both
banks of a canal, as is the case in Fig. 10. Here, too, often is a
single street and it very narrow, very crowded and very busy. Stone
steps lead from the houses down into the water where clothing,
vegetables, rice and what not are conveniently washed. In this
particular village two rows of houses stand on one side of the canal
separated by a very narrow street, and a single row on the other.
Between the bridge where the camera was exposed and one barely