All things considered, there are only two kinds of men in the world—­those that stay at home and those that do not.  The second are the most interesting.  Some day a man will bethink himself and write a book about the breed in a book called ‘The Book of the Overseas Club,’ for it is at the clubhouses all the way from Aden to Yokohama that the life of the Outside Men is best seen and their talk is best heard.  A strong family likeness runs through both buildings and members, and a large and careless hospitality is the note.  There is always the same open-doored, high-ceiled house, with matting on the floors; the same come and go of dark-skinned servants, and the same assembly of men talking horse or business, in raiment that would fatally scandalise a London committee, among files of newspapers from a fortnight to five weeks old.  The life of the Outside Men includes plenty of sunshine, and as much air as may be stirring.  At the Cape, where the Dutch housewives distil and sell the very potent Vanderhum, and the absurd home-made hansom cabs waddle up and down the yellow dust of Adderley Street, are the members of the big import and export firms, the shipping and insurance offices, inventors of mines, and exploiters of new territories with now and then an officer strayed from India to buy mules for the Government, a Government House aide-de-camp, a sprinkling of the officers of the garrison, tanned skippers of the Union and Castle Lines, and naval men from the squadron at Simon’s Town.  Here they talk of the sins of Cecil Rhodes, the insolence of Natal, the beauties or otherwise of the solid Boer vote, and the dates of the steamers.  The argot is Dutch and Kaffir, and every one can hum the national anthem that begins ’Pack your kit and trek, Johnny Bowlegs.’  In the stately Hongkong Clubhouse, which is to the further what the Bengal Club is to the nearer East, you meet much the same gathering, minus the mining speculators and plus men whose talk is of tea, silk, shortings, and Shanghai ponies.  The speech of the Outside Men at this point becomes fearfully mixed with pidgin-English and local Chinese terms, rounded with corrupt Portuguese.  At Melbourne, in a long verandah giving on a grass plot, where laughing-jackasses laugh very horribly, sit wool-kings, premiers, and breeders of horses after their kind.  The older men talk of the days of the Eureka Stockade and the younger of ‘shearing wars’ in North Queensland, while the traveller moves timidly among them wondering what under the world every third word means.  At Wellington, overlooking the harbour (all right-minded clubs should command the sea), another, and yet a like, sort of men speak of sheep, the rabbits, the land-courts, and the ancient heresies of Sir Julius Vogel; and their more expressive sentences borrow from the Maori.  And elsewhere, and elsewhere, and elsewhere among the Outside Men it is the same—­the same mixture of every trade, calling, and profession under the sun; the same