The difference between the first and second class is twofold. One is the color--white for the first class, blue for the second. The accommodation is just the same--leather and plush upholstering of seats plenty large enough, with washstand, toilet and drinking water handy and clean midway of the car. The chief difference is sociologic, tinged with political, economic and moral degrees. First class is for the nobility, second for the bourgeoisie. Though the first-class carriage is lawfully open to anyone possessing seventy-four sen, no second-class Jap ever dares aspire to it. So secure are the officials in the _morale_ of the people that tickets are never examined. You show your pasteboard at the gate as you enter the platform at the beginning of the journey, again as you leave the platform at the end, but not on the train. A third-class fare could easily ride in a first-class coach. No one but a foreigner would ever think of this. I tried it one day and succeeded, getting seventy-four sen worth of nobility for thirty sen. It is an axiom that all foreigners are noble; hence all foreigners should travel first class. Some day Japan will really be civilized. This morning the first-class coach was filled with London tiles and Paris frocks, all silked and diamonded. It was the day of the imperial garden party and all foreigners of note in Yokohama were on their way to the palace in Tokyo. There was a crush of German, French and English. I detected one pair Castilian in suavity of accent. All were agog with gossipy gayety. The men, sleek on Oriental dining as fresh pork packers, plumped seats unusually commodious quite full of broadclothed avoirdupois. The women were agush with scents, mowed from the four quarters. Feminine with suggested lingerie, they left the men to the papers, for the London mail was just in, and toasted some stale diplomatic scandal whose drift I vainly strove to get. Between silk tiles and be-birded bonnets there was not a vacant seat left in the first-class coach. I found a seat in the rear of the second-class coach, which was but half filled. The occupants were Japanese, evidently business and professional men of note, perhaps fifteen all told. Except for the complexions, the upward slant of the eyes and the uniform small stature they might have passed for the occupants of the nine o’clock car downtown any American morning. The dress was the same, the average of intelligence the same. Before I began my paper I studied each face. The Japanese countenance is inscrutable. From coolie to Mikado exists the same placid, patient, nearly always alert expression of canny indifference. Before such uniformity, such hidden power, purpose and weird beginning toothed in the husk of time the most expert western physiognomist is baffled. The geography alone of these humanists of hardy strife can be sketched. Of their history, legends, poesy, knowledge and aspiration little may be said at the outward glance.