and he was too old to labour in the mills. Another went back to claim a fortune, and asked me for the loan of a dollar, which he would be sure to send back as soon as his fingers touched the waiting wealth.

The circle received constant additions, for our laughter and banter reached down to the dreary bunks, and many of their occupants came up to listen. Women brought their half-asleep children and I drew on my stock of sweets. Even the more reticent women talked to “the man,” and told him things glad and sad. A Polish woman was the spokesman of her group.

“We are going back to the Stary Kray (the Old Country). America ne dobre” (not good).

“Why is it not good?”

“The air ne dobre, the food ne dobre, the houses ne dobre.”

Nothing was good.

“We came to America with red cheeks, like the cheeks of summer apples, and now look at us. We are going back looking like cucumbers in the autumn.”

Yes, their cheeks were pale and pinched and their skin wrinkled. How could it be otherwise? They had lived for years by the coke ovens of Pennsylvania, breathing sulphur with every breath; their eyes had rarely seen the full daylight and their cheeks had not often felt the warm sunlight. America “ne dobre.”

And yet something must have seemed good to them; for they wore American clothes. Long, trailing skirts, shirt-waists with abbreviated sleeves and belts with showy buckles. All of them had children, many children of varying sizes, and among the children not one said: “America ne dobre.”

The boys had penetrated into the mysteries of baseball vernacular, and one of them was the short-stop on his team.

When I inquired of him just what a short-stop is, he looked at me pityingly and said: “Say, are you a greenhorn?”

I am sure if I had told him that I was a college professor, he would have asked for my credentials.

Some of the girls, besides having gone to our public schools, belonged to clubs, wore pins and buttons and chewed gum most viciously. All were loath to go to the “Stary Kray.”

I surely was in my element, the human element; with babies to cuddle, to guess their ages and their weight; to watch the boisterous, half Americanized, mysterious youth and to ask questions and answer them among these strong, friendly men.

There was one woman who neither smiled at me nor answered my greeting; who held her half-clothed, puny baby close to her breast, giving him his evening meal. Other little ones, seemingly all of one age, huddled close to the mother, who looked like a great, frightened bird hovering over her young.

“Her man been killed in the mine,” the women said, and I found no more questions to ask her. I could only sympathize with her in her grief; for I knew it. I knew it because I had seen her or her kind, by the hundreds at a time, prone on the ground beside the yawning pit, claiming some unrecognizable form as that of husband or son; often of husband and son. I have heard the bitter wails and lamentations of a whole hillside. Out of each hut they came, the heart-broken cries of the living over the dead; and in that grief, the Slovak, the Polish or the Italian women were just like the American woman, who more silently, perhaps, grieved over her husband, the foreman of the mine. In the radiant morning he walked away from her and home; into the mine, his tomb.

The poor Slav woman had paid the price for her American hopes and had a right to say: “America ne dobre”; but she did not say it.

“Lift my boy!” a rather muscular, good-looking man said, in the English of New York’s East Side. He seemed a little jealous of the attention I had paid to these strange children.

“He’s the real stuff,” he continued. “A genuine Yankee boy. Born on the East Side.”

“My! But he’s heavy!”

“You bet he is!” the proud father exclaimed, after my only half successful effort to lift the youngster.

“He’s going to be a prize-fighter, like his daddy;” and before I realized it I was initiated into the technicalities of the prize-ring. My new friend proved to be an aspirant for strange honours, especially strange when sought by a Jew. His ambition was to be a champion.

“I was the foist one,” he said, “to start the fighting business among the Jews. There’s lots of ’em now.”

Why was he going over? His wife, a native of Hungary, had grown homesick for the Magyarland. She was dying of that most dreadful of all diseases, consumption; so her Ike and little Joe were going with her to Budapest.

“Say,” Ike confided, “I don’t know what that Old Country is like; but I’ll be hiking back to the good old Bowery in six weeks unless I’m mighty much mistaken.”

Little Joe, with all his weight, had nestled in my arms and grown quite affectionate. When we parted, he called me “Uncle,” and I was properly proud of being the uncle of a future champion prize-fighter of the world.

By the time the first bugle sounded for dinner I had tasted enough of the joys of this new fellowship; so I said good-night in four languages. Up to the deck and to my cabin door, I could hear little Joe calling after me in a voice like that of a lusty young rooster, “Good-night, uncle!”

Dinner in the first cabin was fashionably quiet; for it was our first evening meal together, and we were measuring and scanning one another after the manner of fashionable folk, trying to decide with whom it was safe to speak.

We reached the point of discussing the dinner and the merits of Italian cooking; we spoke of the weather and hoped it would remain so calm and beautiful all the way. Some of us even went so far as to ask our neighbour if this was the first trip over, which is a rather silly question to ask nowadays when every one has crossed the ocean a dozen times, except a few very extraordinary people.

After dinner, as we lounged on deck, a lady, whose face I could not see, sat down beside me and said: “You don’t approve ladies’ smoking, do you?” With that, she drew from her silver case a cigarette, and put it to her lips.

“I don’t myself,” she continued; “but I smoke because my whole nature is reacting against the Connecticut Puritanism in which I have been steeped. I don’t enjoy smoking, at least my nerves don’t; but my whole self takes pleasure in it because I have been told over and over again that I mustn’t; so now I do.

“I do everything, even drink cocktails, as you have seen. I do love to shock people.”

I told her that I had grown accustomed to shocks, that I had seen something of the world, was fairly well acquainted with the weakness of the flesh and the power of the devil; but that I really thought it strange that an American woman and a mother should smoke and drink. Her daughter, a girl of about sixteen, properly gowned and coldly indifferent, watched her mother and listened to our conversation until her maid came and bore her away, after she had bade her mother an unaffectionate good-night.

I suppose it was the cigarettes that made my neighbour communicative, perhaps it was simply because she wanted to talk, that she told me her story—a story more lamentable than I have ever heard in the steerage.

She was graduated from a college which prides itself more than most colleges, on being an intellectual centre. Immediately after entering society she married a man of her own set, wealthy, cultured and a university graduate. Now, after seventeen years of married life, she had obtained a divorce, because, as she said, they had “had enough of each other.” He had already married, and she was going to Europe to find a