At last we were ready to move on, and, still accompanied by our thieving friend, who evidently wanted to see me safe where he thought I could do him no harm, and where I might pay him a little more for valuable information, we entered the great north pen in the Capitaneria, where emigrants in hundreds were standing, with their passports out, in a solid mass held back by police, who peeled off the front row from right to left, then back again; and we filed across the room to a door in the corner where was the American staff, the port doctor, the surgeons on duty for the United States Marine Hospital Corps, the ship’s surgeon, and some others. We were examined; our eyelids were turned up for trachoma; our heads rubbed over for favus; any defective-looking parts of the body touched for hidden disease; and every now and then a man, woman, or child would be told to stand aside for further examination, and a wail would go up from the group to which that one belonged. It was as if a touch of death had come among them. I saw one old man who had taken his wife and widowed daughter with her two children, sold all his little property, and was starting for America to open up a little business of some sort, pulled out of the line, examined for some spinal trouble, and turned down. The family could not go without him, so they were all turned back. There were two or three other cases like that, which happened there before my eyes. Last year we turned back over 20,000, including dependent relatives, at our ports and borders. They should never have been allowed to leave home. That is where our system is wrong. The emigrant should not be selected at the port of arrival, nor at the port of embarkation, but by a small visiting itinerant board that should come to him in his home community. We would thus get none of the bad and lose none of the good, and a hundred outrages would be avoided. The fuller argument I hope to give with the light of facts yet to be told. When we appeared at the bar of the police official who inspects all passports, I made our presence known to Mr. St. Ledger, and after a word from him to the official we were passed, went by the place where the police were taking weapons from suspected bad men, and out into the enclosure where our baggage was. Against the fence I saw the face of the _capo_ of the gang of thieves and counterfeiters. Under a pretext I got the party halted, re-entered the building, followed by the perplexed St. Ledger, and, when inside, where the thieves’ sentinels could not see, I unfolded the plot I had discovered. In a word, before the ship sailed I had the pleasure of seeing the _capo_ and two others in the hands of detectives, and the others would have been captured had not the port doctor, the instant he was informed of it, rushed up to me in full view outside in the baggage enclosure, followed by half a dozen officers, and at the sight the thieves flew like birds.