It was not long before we wound down to the little station, and day began to break in the east, turning the cloud of vapor over Stromboli into the semblance of a huge pink rose growing up out of the island volcano. Many of the people from the country about were gathered to see their own friends off, for there was quite a party by this time. Soon the train crept around the coast from Milazzo and brought up with a jerk and a blast of the conductor’s horn. Here farewells were brief. I heard one of the Socosa boys’ father cursing the train because it was the agent of the separation from his son, and then out of the hurly-burly came a slamming of compartment doors, cries of “Pronte! Pronte!” another blast of the horn, and we were hurried away to Messina.

It was at the station that Antonio’s first wrestling-match with the mountain of the party’s baggage occurred. At Santa Lucia there had been abundant willing hands to pile it on the train, and no other baggage with which to confuse it. Also, nothing had been said about excess charges. At Messina it was ripped open by the city customs officials, then hustled from place to place till at last it was dispatched to the North German Lloyd office, and Antonio emerged from the encounter a dripping wreck of his former immaculate self. When we next saw it, it was piled into a barge, and standing guard over it was a uniformed government 131official who begged piteously before he departed for enough money to buy his dinner, and was well enough satisfied with thirty centesimi (about six cents).

I have previously described the operations of the questura of Messina. Passports in hand, the entire party joined the great mass of people from all parts of eastern Sicily crowded into the steamship broker’s office. Here each person was compelled to make a declaration, which declaration answers the twenty-two questions that are propounded regularly at Ellis Island. When the Socosa boys, in answer to the question as to whether they had work promised or not, said that they had, the agent advised them to answer this question in the negative. When Giunta and Curro said they expected no one to meet them, they were advised to get some one, and so on through the group. The steamship broker’s agent, in filling out the blanks of this declaration, thus fortified the emigrant in the weak places of his case for admission, and if the emigrant is turned back he has no claim for damages against the brokers. Numbers of suits were formerly brought and won, but under the present system none have been successful, and in cases where the returned emigrant is able to pay for the passage on his deportation the broker can force him to do so.

It will be noticed that I have used the term broker instead of steamship agent. The explanation will be a revelation to most people in the United States, for I found not long since that officials high in the Bureau of Immigration were not aware of the following facts, which is another bit of proof of how weak our system of dealing with immigration from this side of the water is. The steamship company does not book the third-class passengers. Emigration is promoted by 132sub-agents in the villages, such as Carmelo Merlino in Gualtieri, who operate under district agents such as Colajanni in Messina, who are selected, appointed and bonded by the Italian government and not by the steamship company. They are responsible to the government and not to the steamship company. They deliver their passengers at so much per head to the steamship company at the foot of the plank, and a percentage of their receipts finds its way to the government treasury. They are required to have their offices in what is called a judicial town, where there is a questura and the operations of the ticket brokerage system and the police passports dovetail nicely.

The process of clearing all papers, baggage receipts, tickets to the steamer to Naples, tickets to America from Naples, was passed through by our party, and then, it being but little after noon and the hour for going aboard being four o’clock, they scattered. Many went to homes of relatives in Messina for a final visit. Several of the boys spent unwarrantable sums of their precious money in buying ugly looking knives with which to face the dangers that they had read so much about in the papers, cheap, worthless watches, and clothes that would only be thrown away; and everywhere a group passed some of those parasites of the port who prey upon emigrants and make an effort to wheedle or swindle them out of a bit of silver.

DEPARTURE FROM GUALTIERI
“Declaring” in the Messina Office—Party’s Baggage on Lighter—Friends, Neighbors and Relatives

On my first visit to Messina I had the pleasure of intimate knowledge of the discovery of a bold fraud, and the arrest and punishment of the thief. He was a man of fair appearance, who had for three years made a practice of stopping emigrants just before they were about to go aboard the steamer by means of the small boats in the harbor, and demanding if they had had 133their tickets stamped “by the American doctor.” The frightened emigrant, knowing that somewhere in the process he would encounter “the American doctor,” to him an object of dread, would reply that he had not. The party would then be taken to a small office in an alleyway opening off the water front and a stamp put on the ticket for which the victims would be charged three francs sixty, about seventy cents each. Mr. Charles M. Caughy, the American consul at Messina, caught this fellow and saw to it that he was soundly punished. Our party escaped with a few minor mishaps, thanks to the vigilance of Antonio and myself. One of the boys fell a victim to a fake street dentist who had a carriage, a set of tools and a professional air. He related the sufferings with toothache experienced by emigrants on the Atlantic, and advised the extraction of all bad teeth. One old woman from Catania had three taken out at a franc each. While I was trying to get a photograph of the fakir one of our boys got into the carriage, and the dentist was so eager to have me get a good, full view of his face that he yanked out one of the boy’s perfectly good teeth. I am ............