In the far corner sat a man whose personality attracted with an unmistakable potency. Sensitive to what psychologists call the aura, I instinctively felt that he was a person of distinction, a distinction genuine in that it must be inherent, for nothing obvious indicated his difference from the other Japanese. He wore a frock coat which had seen use and a beaver hat, apparently of English make, as it had a Piccadilly smugness found nowhere else. None of his countrymen in the car wore cuffs like his, which were links. The others were old-fashioned in plain roundness. His tie was ample and of heavy silk, four-in-hand with a certain regality of flourish. His shoes were wide, short, homely, well-furnished. Only two items of his apparel were unlike those of anyone else. One was the pendant from his watchchain, a superb head of polished onyx on which I could make out the square and compass of the Masonic regalia. The other was a button the size of an American copper cent which he wore in his left lapel. It looked like the button of the Legion of Honor. Later I learned that it was the insignia of the first-class order of the Rising Sun. Only twenty-two men in the world have the right to wear that. I also noticed that his left leg was slightly bent. He appeared to be bow-legged. The unknown held a newspaper in front of his face. When the train had been two minutes out of Yokohama he put the paper down and looked out upon the landscape. Then I recognized the Marquis Ito, who was born a poor boy of ordinary family in an imperial land, and who is now known before the world as the father of the New Japan. Some historian has written that the Nineteenth Century produced four constructive statesmen of the first rank; two--Bismarck and Cavour--in the west, and two--Li Hung Chang and Ito--in the east. Another puts him down as the greatest of the four because he is the most humble. Of Ito’s place in history it is not the purpose here to speak. This is but the record of a chance hour when I saw him this morning take a second-class carriage to Tokyo that he might escape the crowd of foreigners whom he doubtless felt would annoy him with attention, when he wishes to be undisturbed. He has one sure mark of the prophets, that of being unhonored in his own country. The people say that he is proud, which is their interpretation of his aloofness, and that he does things unbecoming a gentleman. By this they mean his fondness for geisha, which he makes no attempt to conceal, despising public opinion and thus calling upon his head that which he despises. He is the antithesis of Disraeli, of whom Gladstone could say that he was the only public man in England, unmarried, who could live his maturity without being mixed up with a petticoat. Ito makes no secret of his feminine promiscuity.