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104 his caste-mark, and rides in the jam of a third-class car, touching sweepers and water-carriers and corpse-burners, and trusts to after-purification. Instead of the Chinese hostility to railways, they have so much adopted them for their own that there is already a hereditary railway caste, and railway workers of the third generation are following their fathers' occupation as naturally as if it were an occupation of centuries' inheritance. One never arrives at an end of the puzzling caste distinctions. With the four great castes of Brahmans subdivided into eighteen hundred and eighty-six castes, it is beyond any European mind to master its intricacies. Because of caste, no one jostles you in the street, and insistent touts keep a safe distance.