clash of conflicting interests touching the uttermost parts of the earth; the same intimate, and sometimes appalling knowledge of your neighbour’s business and shortcomings; the same large-palmed hospitality, and the same interest on the part of the, younger men in the legs of a horse.  Decidedly, it is at the Overseas Club all the world over that you get to know some little of the life of the community.  London is egoistical, and the world for her ends with the four-mile cab radius.  There is no provincialism like the provincialism of London.  That big slack-water coated with the drift and rubbish of a thousand men’s thoughts esteems itself the open sea because the waves of all the oceans break on her borders.  To those in her midst she is terribly imposing, but they forget that there is more than one kind of imposition.  Look back upon her from ten thousand miles, when the mail is just in at the Overseas Club, and she is wondrous tiny.  Nine-tenths of her news—­so vital, so epoch-making over there—­loses its significance, and the rest is as the scuffling of ghosts in a back-attic.

Here in Yokohama the Overseas Club has two mails and four sets of papers—­English, French, German, and American, as suits the variety of its constitution—­and the verandah by the sea, where the big telescope stands, is a perpetual feast of the Pentecost.  The population of the club changes with each steamer in harbour, for the sea-captains swing in, are met with ‘Hello! where did you come from?’ and mix at the bar and billiard-tables for their appointed time and go to sea again.  The white-painted warships supply their contingent of members also, and there are wonderful men, mines of most fascinating adventure, who have an interest in sealing-brigs that go to the Kurile Islands, and somehow get into trouble with the Russian authorities.  Consuls and judges of the Consular Courts meet men over on leave from the China ports, or it may be Manila, and they all talk tea, silk, banking, and exchange with its fixed residents.  Everything is always as bad as it can possibly be, and everybody is on the verge of ruin.  That is why, when they have decided that life is no longer worth living, they go down to the skittle-alley—­to commit suicide.  From the outside, when a cool wind blows among the papers and there is a sound of smashing ice in an inner apartment, and every third man is talking about the approaching races, the life seems to be a desirable one.  ’What more could a man need to make him happy?’ says the passer-by.  A perfect climate, a lovely country, plenty of pleasant society, and the politest people on earth to deal with.  The resident smiles and invites the passer-by to stay through July and August.  Further, he presses him to do business with the politest people on earth, and to continue so doing for a term of years.  Thus the traveller perceives beyond doubt that the resident is prejudiced by the very fact of his residence, and gives it as his matured