ABSTRACT
Next to the third it is the best of the three classes for the student. In the third you might see and hear most were it not so often necessary to put your head out of the window. In the third you are compelled to interrupt your studies of the people with a frequent scrutiny of the permanent way. The Japanese folk, you see, are prodigious travellers. It is a people which is always in motion ; on foot, by rikisha, per railway train. Tokyo maintains fifty thousand rikisha-pullers, one per thirty inhabitants. Per railway train they travel at a farthing a mile third-class. And they travel-everywhere, wherever the railway goes, on the least provocation, many old ladies to visit the chaste little tombs of their ancestors, on the brow of a green hill two, three, four provinces away, over many sunlit horizons. So it is far from comfortable travelling in the third-class carriages of Japanese railways.
