hours; toward evening the hatches were transformed into grandstands from which the assembled third-class populace cheered on the panting contestants and greeted each downfall with a cannonade of laughter, in which even the vanquished joined.

More constant and universal than all else, however, was the demand for music. The most diffident possessor of a mouth-organ or a jew's-harp knew no peace during his waking hours. Great was the joy when, as dusk was falling on the second day out, a Calabrian who had won fortune and corpulence as a grocer in Harlem, clambered on deck, straining affectionately to his bosom a black box with megaphone attachment.

"E un fonógrafo," he announced proudly; "a present I take to the old madre at home." He warded off with his elbows the exultant uprising and deposited the instrument tenderly on a handkerchief spread by his wife on a corner of the hatch. "For a hundred dollars, signori!" he cried; "Madre di Dío! How she will wonder if there is a little man in the box! For on the first day, signori, I do not tell her how the music is put in the fonógrafo, ha! ha! ha! not for a whole day!"--and the joke came perilously near to choking him into apoplexy long before its perpetration.

A turn of the key and the apparatus struck up "La donna è móbile," the strikingly clear tones floating away on the evening air to blend with the wash of the sea on our bow. A hush fell over the forward deck; into the circle of faces illumed by the swinging ship's lantern crept the mirage of dreams; a sigh sounded in the black night of the outskirts.

"E Bonci, amici," whispered the Calabrian as the last note died away.

The announcement was superfluous; no one else could have sung the sprightly little lyric with such perfection.

Bits of other operas followed, plantation melodies, and the monologues of witty Irishmen; but always the catholic instrument came back to "La donna è móbile," and one could lean back on one's elbows and fancy the dapper little tenor standing in person on the corner of the hatch, pouring out his voice to his own appreciative people.

Thereafter as regularly as the twilight appeared the Calabrian with his "fonógrafo." The forward deck took to sleeping by day that the evening musicale might be prolonged into the small hours. Whatever its imperfections, the little black box did much to charm away the monotony of the voyage, in its early stages.

But good fortune is rarely perennial. One night in mid-Atlantic a first-class passenger of the type that adds, by contrast, to the attractiveness of the steerage, his arms about the waists of two damsels old enough to have known better, paused to hang over the rail. Bonci was singing. The promenader surveyed the oblivious multitude below in silence until the aria ended, then turned on his heel with a snort of contempt. The maidens giggled, the affectionate trio strolled aft, and a moment later the cabin piano was jangling a Broadway favorite. When I turned my head the Calabrian was closing his instrument.

"No, amici, no more," he said as protest rose; "We must not annoy the rich signori up there."

Nor could he be moved to open the apparatus again as long as the voyage lasted.

Amid the general merriment of home-coming was here and there a note of sadness in the caverns of the Prinzessin. On a hatch huddled day by day, when, the sun was high, a family of three, doomed to early extinction by the white-faced scourge of the north. Below, it was whispered, lay an actress once famous in the Italian quarter, matched in a race with death to her native village. A toil-worn Athenian, on life's down grade, who had been robbed on the very eve of sailing of seven years' earnings of pick and shovel, tramped the deck from dawn to midnight with sunken head, refusing either food or drink. Now and again he stepped to the rail to shake his knotted fist at the western horizon, stretched his arms on high, and took up again his endless march.

Then there were the deported--seven men whose berths were not far from my own. One had shown symptoms of trachoma; another bore the mark of a bullet through one hand; a third was a very Hercules, whom the port doctors had pronounced flawless, but who had landed with four dollars less than the twenty-five required. With this single exception, however, one could not but praise the judgment of Ellis Island. The remaining four were dwarfish Neapolitans, little more than wharf rats; and the best of Naples bring little that is desirable. Yet one could not but pity the unpleasing little wretches, who had risen so far above their environment as to save money in a place where money is bought dearly, and whose only reward for years of repression of every appetite had been a month of misery and frustration.

"Porca di Madonna!" cursed the nearest, pointing to three small blue scars on his neck; "For nothing but these your infernal doctors have made me a beggar!"

"On the sea, when it was too late," whined his companion, "they told me we with red eyes should not go to New York, but to a city named Canada. Madre dí Dío! Why did I not take my ticket to this Canada?"

"You will next time?" I hinted.

"Next time!" he shrieked, dropping from his bunk as noiselessly as a cat. "Is there a next time with a book like that?" He shook in my face the libretto containing a record of his activities since birth, lacking which no Italian of the proletariat may live in peace in his own land nor embark for another. Across every page was stamped indelibly the word "deported."

"They ruined it, curse them! It's something in your maledetta American language that tells the police not to let me go and the agenzia not to sell me a ticket. My book is destroyed! Sono scomunicato! And where shall I get the money for this next time, díceme? To come to America I have worked nine, ten, sangue della Vergine! how do I know how many years! Why did I not take the ticket to this Canada?"

On the morning of June seventh we raised the Azores; at first the dimmest blot on the horizon, a point or two off the starboard bow, as if the edge of heaven had been salt-splashed by a turbulent wave. Excited dispute arose in the throng that quickly mustered at the rail. All but the nautical-eyed saw only a cloud, which in a twinkling the hysterical had pronounced the forerunner of a howling tempest that was soon to bring to the Prinzessin the dreaded mal di mare, perhaps even ununctioned destruction. One quaking father drove his family below and barricaded his corner against the tornado-lashed night to come.

An hour brought reassurance, however, and with it jubilation as the outpost of the eastern world took on corporate form. Before sunset we were abreast the island. An oblong hillside sloped upward to a cloud-cowled peak. Villages rambled away up tortuous valleys; here and there the green was dotted with chalk-white houses and whiter churches. Higher still the island was mottled with duodecimo fields of grain, each maturing in its own season; while far and near brilliant red windmills, less stolid and thick-set than those of Holland, toiled in the breeze, not hurriedly but with a deliberate vivacity befitting the Latin south. Most striking of all was a scent of profoundest peace that came even to the passing ship, and a suggestion of eternal summer, not of burning days and sultry nights, but of early June in some fairy realm utterly