When midsummer came it was of course still too hot in southern Italy for us to go there with safety, let alone comfort, and it was becoming every day more onerous to live in the quarter. New Yorkers who dwell up-town and have entire houses, floors or apartments to themselves complain bitterly of the heat in summer, and, if possible, escape from the city. I have passed a whole summer in New York up-town, but, permit me to say that it is life at a seaside resort compared to what the people endure in the down-town tenement districts.
I think that we could have supported the heat, but the conglomerate of smells increased until it was overpowering, and each night the entire quarter was in tumult until well towards dawn. We learned then what we came to know so well thereafter, that when the Italian cannot sleep he fain would sing and play lotto, seven and a half, or mora. At last, in June, my wife became quite sick one day, and two days later we were off on a trip by steamer to Newfoundland, Labrador and Nova Scotia, returning early in August in time to sail on the Lahn of the North German Lloyd line.
The morning of our departure was a beautiful one, and as we crossed by the Hoboken ferry we could see the great German ships lying at the Hamburg-American and North German Lloyd docks. One of 26them had smoke pouring from her funnels, and a “blue peter” fluttered at her peak,—the signal that she was about to sail.
We were dressed in the plainest and cheapest of clothes, bought and worn previously in the quarter, and everything we owned we had stored except what could be got into a little $1.10 imitation-leather dressing-case, with a shoulder-strap clipped into screw-eyes in the end to make easy porterage. Over half of its contents were photographic and stationery supplies. Instead of a shirt I wore the usual dark jersey such as many Italians in this country wear. Around my waist was a plain leather belt cleverly made of two strips between which reposed several thousand lire, easily put in or taken out through a neatly concealed aperture. Once thereafter a man handled that belt and threw it down as not worth taking, when it had in it a sum that would have gladdened his heart. I bore the one piece of baggage, while my wife carried, slung over her shoulder, the five-by-seven cartridge kodak which was our most jealous ward, our one essential treasure.
We had bought tickets at the Greenwich Street office of the North German Lloyd Company, where the steerage traffic is handled, under the names of Berto and Luiga Brandi and when doing so were asked our ages, places of birth, occupation, etc. On inquiry I found that the Italian law requires this of the ship’s company, and that these sheets are used to keep track of returned emigrants and facilitate apprehension of any men who have avoided military duty.
As we pushed our way through the crowd on the dock, where freight and steerage baggage was being rushed out of the way of the “first-cabiners,” who had 27not yet begun to arrive, we were startled to find what an enormous number of fellow passengers we were to have compared to the steerage capacity of the ship and the agent’s forecast of the load. He had conjectured 350 four days before. We sailed with more than 750 and certainly had a full house.
As we came up the gangway we were checked off by a short, heavy-set official in a black-lustre coat and dirty piqué cap; and a white-aproned stewardess of massive frame gave us two little red cards which read “Good for One Ration,” while a steerage steward thrust into our hands a piece of horse-blanket goods of very poor material and very scant in dimensions, wrapped around a tin spoon, tin fork and tin cup, as well as a little pan about the pork-and-bean size. As we passed on into the crowd and into an unoccupied corner of the deck, and my wife unrolled her blanket and saw what was inside, a certain startled, stricken look came into her eyes. I knew that for the first time realization of a part of what was before her had come to her. I had often told her as nearly as I could, speaking from my own experiences as a sailor when studying seafaring life, of how steerage passengers lived on emigrant ships; but now any sort of “camping-out glamour” that had hung about it for her was dispelled, and she had a glimpse to the fore where misery, dirt and discomfort lay spread. If she was sorry she had come, she did not say so. I will confess that we had long since made a private bargain about the enterprise, and the consideration was well worth the while, so she showed no sign of wavering from her agreement.
The deck forward was the scene of the wildest commotion. Many people who were returning had been 28accompanied to the dock by their friends, and these, standing on shore, shouted vainly to their compatriots aboard. The noise was too great for speech except at close range. On every hand was piled baggage of all shapes and sizes; but I remembered it afterwards with envy when I saw the terrible mass of nondescript luggage which smothered the steerage on the return trip. The immigrant comes here with a huge pile of bundles, wooden boxes and flimsy bags; he goes home with good steel-framed valises and good trunks.
The chatter that prevailed about was mostly Italian, and I found that some of the dialects spoken I could not understand at all. I had not even encountered them in the quarter. Then, too, there were aboard, Greeks, Spaniards, Swiss, Germans, Macedonians, Montenegrians, Hungarians, Jews of several sorts, Syrians, etc. All spoke English in stages varying from a complete command down to the ability to swear. American “cuss words” are among the first things picked up and the last forgot. Strange, isn’t it?
We had been promised that we might secure places,—after we were on board, in a closed compartment with four other people, a sort of superior steerage accommodation to be had at the expense of $10 added to the $35 for passage, which we had paid, and, leaving my wife seated in a clean spot on a hatch, I scoured the ship within the limits of the steerage to find those compartments, but all I got was a series of round cursings from the petty officers for bothering them while they were busy. I nosed about every corner of the ship forward, and if there were those compartments for three married couples, which are popularly supposed to exist in the emigrant quarters and had been referred to in serious editorials in notable publications within the past three months as being “all that the ship’s people could be expected to give the third class in the way of comfort and privacy,” I was unable to find them, nor did I see them or hear of them at any time later on the Lahn or any other ship I have inspected.
Life on the Steerage-passengers’ Deck on the Lahn
29When I came on deck a stocky Italian, well dressed in American clothes, was holding an umbrella over my wife, for the sun was beating down on the ship’s deck, and it was terrifically hot on board, moored as she was to the south side of the pier. They were chatting in English, and when I came up the stranger introduced himself as John Tury, of Lancaster, Pa., a peanut and fruit seller, who had been in this country five years and was now going home to Terra Nova, his native village in Sicily, for a brief visit. He had with him three cousins, younger men. His English was good though not perfect, and he refused to use Italian either with us or any one else on shipboard except when necessary. We sat talking for an hour or more, and became quite good friends, while waiting for the ship to sail and for a semblance of order to come about.
As yet we had no sleeping quarters. There seemed to be nothing to do but find places in the men’s and women’s compartments, and they were already so well filled when we went aboard that there was not a desirable bed left. I went below, where between decks the long, closely set double tiers of iron bunks were ranged, and looked in vain for a bunk that was not occupied by women and children or a piece of baggage left to signify that it had been pre-empted. There were some empty beds in the men’s compartments, but they were badly located for light and air. There 30seemed to be nothing to gain by being in a hurry, and it was a long time till evening and bedtime. I knew there was more room on the ship, and I meant to have some of it even if I had to leave the steerage quarters; for our only interest in voyaging to Italy in the steerage was to seek information by association, whereas when coming back to the States it would be to be constantly with the family with which we expected to return.
When I returned to the deck, the big liner had slid out of the slip and was just forging her way down stream. Back on the pier was a black group of people waving handkerchiefs, parasols and hats. One large group of Italians I observed, watching the serrated profile of Manhattan with great interest, and I heard them talking of it as if they had never seen it before. So I said to one of them:
“Have you been in America and have not seen New York?”
“No, we came to Boston and by railroad to Scranton.”
“Have you been at work in the mines?”
“Yes, they are just sending forty of us back home, and one hundred more will go next month.”
I knew at once that the group was one of contract laborers who were being returned to their country, and by questioning him further I learned that they had been employed in the Lackawanna mines and had got employment through an Italian “banker” in Scranton who had sent two men to Italy in October of the year before, and during the winter they had hired in the vicinity of Potenza nearly three hundred men and despatched them in small parties on successive steamers to Boston in the months of March, April and May. Those who 31were now returning were those who had been hurt, were sick, or were dissatisfied. Ten of them had had accidents and four had lung trouble; one poor fellow, he told me, being even then in the ship’s hospital for steerage passengers dying with consumption, the result of his two years’ work under ground.
The steerage passengers are supposed to form themselves into groups of six, and one man of the six is the one to receive the food as it is ladled out of huge tanks on deck by the steerage stewards; but not having had time to get properly assorted, dinner was now served to the steerage on a basis of “every man look out for his own.”
I took our two tin pans and the tin cups, and plunged into the crush waiting to pass in line down the alley which was made by the tanks and baskets of food, ranged on the deck forward, and emerged in half an hour with two messes of macaroni and meat, two tin cups of highly acid and alcoholic wine and a cap full of hot potatoes.
As my wife looked the fare over when I brought it to her as she squatted in a nook sheltered from the sun, her lips trembled and she looked away towards Staten Island, then dropping into dim distance, as if wishing that she could by some magic word transport herself back to home-land soil once more. But in an instant her courage forced a smile, and we closed our eyes and ate and drank. It did not taste so bad, after all, but it was the look of it! And the way the women and children about us spilled it around on the deck and on themselves!
After we had eaten what little we might, we ensconced ourselves in a bit of shade and watched the crowd about. Every moment that passed, every bit of conversation 32we caught, every small incident that occurred, showed us that for months we had been moving on a false plane, that just at that time when we thought ourselves in the genuine atmosphere of the life of the Italian immigrant in the New World, we were merely in that false temporizing atmosphere which he creates for himself and fellows, and from which he emerges only when he has become Americanized. In a few minutes we understood that the greater portion of the conditions, habits and operations which we had observed grew out of a feeling among them that they were merely temporizing here; that they had come to America to make a few hundred dollars to send or take back to Italy; and that it did not make much difference what they ate, wore or did, just so long as they got the money and got back. We could see plainly why it was that they had not risen above that state until they had been attracted and drawn into the real American life about them and had decided to remain. Here were hundreds of Italians just such as those who had been our household neighbors, but they were now a different people. They spoke freely, they bore themselves differently. There was a new certainty and boldness in their manner, for they were free and cut off from all things American, and, without imperilling a single interest, could return to everything that was Italian. Separated from its opportunities for betterment, their state in this country is inferior to that at home. This I can say conscientiously after long and careful observation.
We became acquainted with a woman who sat near us and who had a very pretty little girl. This woman said she came from Pittsburg, having been born of Italian parents in this country when the first Italians came from the north of Italy about twenty-five years ago. 33She had married an Italian who had emigrated more recently, and now they were going home for a visit. She expressed intense disgust at the manner in which about one third of the women conducted themselves and allowed their children to behave. These women were the ones who made the noise, who scattered the filth, who sprawled about on deck and whose children, though on board but a few hours as yet, were sights to behold from being allowed to play in the scuppers where the refuse from dinner had collected in heaps purpled with the wasted wine.
From her we learned that her husband had been commissioned by a contractor in Pittsburg to go into the Italian provinces of Austria,—by which is meant the Austrian possession immediately around the head of the Adriatic, where the stock is Italian,—and engage two hundred good stonemasons, two hundred good carpenters, and an indefinite number of unskilled laborers. These people were to be put in touch with sub-agents of lines sailing from Hamburg, Fiume and Bremen, and these agents were to be accountable for these contract laborers being got safely into the United States. This woman informed us that many of her neighbors in Pittsburg had come into the United States as contract laborers, and held the law in great contempt, as it was merely a matter of being sufficiently instructed and prepared, and no official at Boston or Ellis Island could tell the difference.
We had been seated there a little while when there came by a sailor whom I had known in Hamburg some years before, and when I stepped aside to talk with him he was greatly surprised but remembered me, and we talked of many things which do not pertain to this consideration, save that just before he left I told him 34that we were on the lookout for the best sleeping and eating accommodations we could get in the steerage, and he answered, laughingly, that it was easy enough to get a good place and good things to eat—if I had money. I signified that I had.
He said he would send me a man who would be the person with whom to dicker. When he was gone, I sat down to wait. In about an hour I saw a tall, well-built man in ship’s working rig, neither a sailor nor a steward, though moving about the steerage apparently looking for some one; so I moved his way, and when he saw me he sidled up cautiously, glancing up at the bridge, the forward end of the boat and the hurricane deck to see who might be observing. I spoke to him in German; but he replied in English and said we had better talk English, as it was the language that was safe from eavesdroppers.
He said he would sell us good beds for $10 each, and we could buy food as we wished it. The food would be furnished by the first-cabin cook and would be savings from the galley. I demanded to see the beds first, and he led the way below. He took us to the entrance to the steerage compartments nearest amidships, where they opened into a little alleyway, at one end of which was one of the public bars for the sale of beer to those Italians, Jews, etc., who have learned to drink beer instead of wine. Beside the companion-way which led down to the compartments for third-class passengers was a narrow one marked “Hospital.” It led down past the steerage dispensary and to the two rooms apportioned for female sick. A narrow alleyway passed transversely to the other side of the ship, where there were two rooms for the male sick. My conductor was the hospital steward, and his offer to us was a bunk 35each in the hospital wards, to which we could come at night as if we were patients. I could not see how it was safe to pay the money in advance, and then be ousted by the ship’s doctor the first time he made his rounds. So this hospital steward, who was called Otho, surprised me by summoning the ship’s doctor, a young German with a fringe of flaxen beard and bulging eyes, and allowing him to reassure me. It was all right. He got his share of the money from the rental of the bunks. All of them expressed a great fear and dread of the Italian doctor, the naval surgeon put on each emigrant ship by the Italian government.
In brief, as the beds were clean, the situation interesting and the hospital wards not very crowded, we accepted, and whenever the food on deck was not to our liking we could get an abundance from the hospital. It was rather wearisome, the last few days, though. Duck and chicken for every meal!
In my room there were two others who were paying rent for beds. One was a quaint old fellow from Tuckahoe, where he kept a saloon. He was on his way home for the fourth time. He wore a knit worsted green and yellow skull-cap day and night. It had a long yellow tassel on it, and some nights the tassel would get in his mouth and interfere with his slumbers—and mine. The second room had but one patient in it, one of the contract laborers from Scranton who was dying with consumption and prayed all day long for a sufficient lease of life to see the Bay of Naples, when he felt sure he would begin to get well at once. In three years he had saved and sent home $820, which made his wife and family comparatively independent. He told me one day that even if he died as the result of his voluntary slavery in the mines he felt sufficiently 36repaid. I am glad to say that at least he reached home alive.
Late that afternoon we ran rapidly into murky weather and before long encountered a stiff gale, for August. It lasted all night and all the next day. I have been on ships steadier than the Lahn, and this gale took her nearly on the beam. The seasickness in the steerage was nothing short of frightful. Fortunately the people had had very little to eat—few of them much breakfast on sailing-day and very few any supper—so the most undesirable feature of a seasick crowd was limited. Also many of the third-class passengers had profited by the experiences of former voyages, and were able to take care of themselves and make less bother for their neighbors. Nevertheless, the compartments, in which the people were compelled to stay by reason of the deck weather, were in a state in describing which no good purpose is served. The steerage stewards were constantly busy with hose, sand buckets, brooms, etc.
Not only were we seeking general information, but we were hoping to get trace of some southern Italian family about to emigrate, in order to make them, as planned, the central feature of our analytical study of particular experiences; so, as the days went by, I inquired of each new person with whom I fell into conversation if he knew of such a family. Nearly every other man was either going over to get a wife for himself or already had a family in Italy and expected to return in October, or, if not then, in the following May. In a short time we had twenty families under consideration, but none of them seemed to be exactly typical; they were all too small, too large, too rich or from provinces that sent few emigrants.
37There was a group of eight Greeks aboard who had been denied admission to the United States and were part of twenty-two men, women and children of mixed races who had arrived in New York on the Lahn and other North German Lloyd ships and were being returned by the company. The leader of the group was a huge fellow with very curly hair and beard who rejoiced in the name of Garareikophalous, and the third day I had a long chat with him with the aid of an interpreter from among our fellow passengers.
He said that all Greece was stirred up over the matter of emigration, and that in five years’ time the number of Greeks coming to the United States would have increased a thousand per cent. The military duties in the kingdom were too onerous to be borne, and the Greeks already in the United States were prospering to such an extent that every remittance they made home fired the zeal of the people to follow after them. In nearly every village the candy-makers’ shops were educating twice the usual number of apprentices, because the first emigrants had been candy-makers and they had established a foothold in the confectionery business and then sent for their candy-making relatives, which had caused a shortage in confectioners in Greece and in turn had created the impression that to get on best in America a Greek should be a candy-maker. Therefore every father who desired that his sons should go to America and send him enough money home to make him a rich man among his neighbors, apprenticed them to candy-making and after two years shipped them to New York. Some of the venturesome ones had branched out in the dried-fruit and olive-oil business, and he had heard they were doing very well. The result would be that as the 38various natural industries of Greece were taken up in America, and opportunities for labor and business offered, the emigration would swell to comparatively huge proportions.
A feature which he mentioned and on which I questioned him exhaustively was the advertising done by the steamship companies. He had some of the advertisements in his pockets, and some others he got from the members of his party. These he translated to the interpreter, who gave me a rough idea of what they were. I found they were not issued by the steamship companies but by sub-agents in Vienna, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, Naples, etc., and were of a very alluring sort. Two of them were poems expatiating on the beauties and wealth of America, and one was a clipping from a Greek paper supposed to be printed in New York, which related how a poor boy from Thessaly had gone to Cincinnati and opened a little candy store. He had broadened his business to a factory, and now had headquarters of four factories in New York, and had property to the extent of a million and a half drachm?, or about $200,000, to show for eight years’ work.
Garareikophalous was very proud of the fact that he and his party had not been deceived by the sub-agents into going to America by the northern route. He averred that every effort is made by the sub-agents all through his country to get the emigrants to go overland to the German or French ports and take ship there instead of shipping at Naples or other Mediterranean ports.
Preparing to Serve a Meal on the Lahn from the Food-tanks and Bread-baskets
I was unable to understand this action of the sub-agents until I had the light of later investigation upon it, when I found that it is a rule of the agents at the 39ports of embarkation never to allow an emigrant who has been denied admission to the United States to return to his native village if business is anything less than rushing from that section, for the reason that one emigrant who has failed to enter the United States can keep three hundred more from trying it. If the emigrant were returned to a southern port, the chances of his reaching home would be greatly increased. Emigrants returned to German and French ports are often reshipped to South Africa, South America and Mexico. Furthermore, when they are of the sort that needs coaching and schooling, in order that they shall not make the wrong answers at Ellis Island, the journey across the continent is used as an educational process in which they are carefully taught to dissemble. If there are members of the family who are physically unfit to be sent to Ellis Island, the sub-agents persuade the family to separate at the port of embarkation, and the diseased and deformed ones are sent across the channel into England and dumped in the charitable institutions. Sometimes they are sent from England, perhaps even from the port of embarkation, to Canada. The Hamburg-American line carries a notoriously bad lot of emigrants into Halifax. This feature I had investigated to my complete satisfaction in July.
More information that was decidedly to the point, I received from two Jews who were returning to assemble a large party of former neighbors and bring them to America, to sell off a quantity of property and in general readjust matters in a town not far from Odessa, in behalf of a coterie of relatives whom they had brought to America previously. Both had lived in Hungary and had traveled all through the districts from which comes the poor Jew of the South. They 40were going to Naples, by rail to Brindisi, then to Alexandria and Smyrna, and would go north from Constantinople. I will confess that it was not easy to elicit information from them, and very indirect processes were necessary; but here are some of the things learned.
Among Russians as well as Jews in Russia the limitations of the American immigration laws are very well known indeed by the priests, school-teachers, officials and others; and when a family desires to emigrate it begins by paying a weekly stipend to some person in this class, who puts them through a course of instruction as to how to carry money, answer questions, conceal diseases, etc. When the family starts it is met at all important stations by a Jewish committee and passed on. An ignorant Jew possessed of some wealth is almost certain to lose much of it at the hands of unscrupulous Jews who infest principal stations, border towns, etc. There have been cases where poor families even lost their little all to these harpies, ending by becoming charitable charges in England or Belgium. In many cases the family is part of a large group under the direct charge of a runner from some sub-agent’s office, but this is usually the case when the people are very poor and obviously diseased. Groups like this are not delivered to the steamship agents at German and French ports, but are sent to a place called the Shelter for Poor Jews which has been established in London, and they are kept there many weeks if necessary, and then sent either to New York, Boston, Halifax or Montreal. Cases of trachoma are treated in this shelter, in great numbers, until the emigrant is ready to pass inspection. Those cases which are regarded as hopeless are sent to Canadian 41towns in care of Jewish societies and are smuggled across the border gradually.
These men had a quantity of letters and credentials signed by various steamship representatives, and I was exceedingly sorry that I could not know whether they were bound on a mission that was much more extensive and nefarious than the plans which they avowed to me.
One fine morning we sighted the Azores and passed close by the shore of St. Michaels, and the second day thereafter we arrived at Gibraltar. Third-class passengers were not encouraged to go ashore, but I made a little arrangement with the man at the plank; and my wife, John Tury, the Lancaster peanut-seller, and I went ashore in the dusk of the evening. The steamer would not leave till after midnight. As we walked along the streets, Tury said to me:
“I suppose if we were going to be here for a day, we might take the train over to London?”
“To London! Why, what do you mean?” I exclaimed.
“Why, I have heard England is a very small place, and it cannot be far from here to London.”
Then I realized that he thought Gibraltar was the southern end of England, and I was surprised to learn later how many Italians who have voyaged by Gibraltar more than once are of the same impression. I have heard some argue for it stoutly.
Just the day before we reached Naples, when there was great happiness and rejoicing on every hand, I observed a well-built young Italian with heavy black hair and moustache, a handsome fellow of twenty-five, come up from below with his mandolin. With him was an older man with a guitar. In a few minutes 42there was a little band of four musicians gathered on the shady side of the ship at the foot of the companion-way to the hurricane deck. They were playing an American two-step, and had a well-pleased crowd about them. On the lapel of the mandolin-player I observed a button of the Foresters. They had begun on the second number of their impromptu concert, when the second officer piped from the bridge, a deck hand went up and came down in a minute with this mandate:
“You must stop playing; the captain wants to sleep.”
Jeers and shouts of scorn and anger rose on every hand, and I observed that the leaders in this expression were those men whom I knew to be American citizens or Italians, Jews or Greeks of some length of residence in the United States.
As the young mandolin-player walked away, I stopped him and spoke to him in English, asking him if he was a Forester. He told me he was and that he belonged to a lodge in Stonington, Conn., and, having been in America five years, was now going home “for the women folks.”
In brief, I found in him and his family the ideal group for which we had been looking. He was sufficiently Americanized to appreciate the object of our investigations, and we speedily became good friends.
His name is Antonio Squadrito, and he had with him his father, Giovanni. Five years before, he had left his native Sicilian village, Gualtieri-Sicamino, as one of the first to depart for America from all that country. He had done so because he had his choice between going into the Carabineers, or rural police, and taking up a trade. He had told his father that if he would 43help him borrow the money he would go to America. This was done, though the neighbors all prophesied disaster and misfortune “in that strange wild land.”
He landed at the Battery from the Kaiser Friedrich, being “recommended” to a distant relative from a northern province who was already in New York; and the first work he got was in the quarries of Westerly, R. I., where he worked for three months at $1.10 per day. He played the mandolin even then with fair skill, and made friends with an Italian who had a barber shop in Stonington. Antonio went there to work, and as he saved his money he sent back, little by little, enough to pay off his debt at home, and the remainder his boss “borrowed” from him. Some domestic relations of the boss caused him to desire to sell out, and one day he came to Antonio and told him he must buy his barber shop or he would not get back the borrowed money. Antonio protested that he could not speak enough English to run the business, but the boss insisted, and in the end Antonio found himself possessed of the shop and a new debt of $100 which he had got as a loan from a man who had taken an interest in him.
The shop prospered. Antonio sent over for his brother Giuseppe to come over and help him. Giuseppe is older and had married a year before, and his wife Camela had presented him with a pretty little girl baby whom they had named Caterina after her grandmother Squadrito. The next year the shop was doing so well that Carlino, the brother next younger than Antonio, was sent for; and the next year Tommasso, a still younger brother, and Giovanni the father were brought over. The father worked at carpentering and coopering in Stonington, making as much as $1.80 per day; but he could not learn the language, and 44when I met him his English was limited to “All right!” “Fine day!” “Yes, sir!” and “cuss words.”
In the last year before our meeting Antonio had married the widow of a whaling-captain of the town, who had been left property by her husband estimated roundly at $60,000. By this time Antonio had made in his barber shop and cigar store and by furnishing music for dances, etc., $8,000, and had sent home five or ten dollars each month. A nice little acre or two of garden land had been bought east of the village, and of this Antonio was very proud, as in his country none but the fairly well-to-do owns land.
Now he was going home to get a party of the family, of cousins and neighbors, and he expected to return in two or three months. That suited the limits of our time, and the location of the family in one of the hotbeds of emigration was most pleasing; so we were delighted when he cordially invited us to go home with him. We explained that we wished to make a sort of general study of the country as it related to the immigration question, before we took up the subject in particular, and he confided that his principal reason for wishing to have us visit him in Gualtieri was to show the people there that all the wonderful stories they had been hearing about him were true in the main. He carried no proof except banking papers, and he was anxious about “what the home folks might think.” I often think of how much of the strenuous endeavor in all lines in this world is to “impress the home folks.” How many men and women have been disappointed when they went out into the world and did something that was absolutely beyond the comprehension—even belief, perhaps—of the simple-minded “folks at home.”
45The next day, late in the morning, signs began to show in the east that we were nearing the shores of Italy, and late that afternoon the Lahn forged into a berth close to the naval sea wall before the beautiful city of Naples.
As we were leaving the ship we saw Carabineers at the gangways arresting several men who had been in the steerage with us. I made inquiry, and was informed that the men arrested had left Italy to avoid military duty, and they had been kept track of. When they sailed home, the Italian authorities in New York had notified the questor, or chief of police, at Naples.
As the tender which took us ashore steamed away from the Lahn, we got a fine view of the ship and its surroundings. It was encompassed on every hand by bumboat-men selling the sweet fruits of Italy, for which her sons and daughters had hungered and thirsted so long. Just outside of the ring of bumboat-men were the twoscore or more boats of the runners for emigrant lodging-houses. These men would get the eye of a returned emigrant on board and would bargain with him for a room, then take him off with his baggage. A police official in plain clothes who was aboard the tender told me that among the curses of the city are the practices in these lodging-houses, where every sort of evil element congregates to prey on the simple-minded countryman who has been to America for two or three years, toiled hard for the few hundred dollars he is bringing back, and yet has not wit enough to keep the thieves of Naples from getting all or a portion of it. However, the returned emigrants are not to be condemned for their witlessness. I flatter myself that I know a thing or two, and yet I found myself on the constant qui vive to keep 46from being “done” in Naples, and even my great vigilance did not save me once or twice. Dishonesty is part of the air in Naples, just as is the smell that is famous.