In a compartment from nine to ten feet high and having a space no larger than six ordinary-sized rooms, were beds for 195 persons, and 214 women and children occupied them. The ventilation was merely what was to be had from the companion-way that opened into the alley-way, and not on the deck, the few ports in the ship’s sides, and the scanty ventilating shafts. The beds were double-tiered affairs in blocks of from ten to twenty, constructed of iron framework, with iron slats set in checker fashion to support the burlap-covered bag of straw, grass, or waste which served as a mattress. Pillows there were none, only cork-jacket life-preservers stuck under one end of the pseudo-mattress to give the elevation of a pillow. As each emigrant had passed through the alley-way to come forward when boarding the ship, he or she had been given a blanket as the storeroom door was passed. This blanket served the purpose of all bedclothing, and any other use to which the emigrant might be forced to put it. In material it was a mixture of wool, cotton, and jute, with the latter predominant. In extent it was the length of a man’s body and a little over a yard and a half wide. For such quarters and accommodations as I have described the emigrant pays half the sum that would buy a first-class passage. A comparison of the two classes shows where the steamship company makes the most money. As soon as ever the women were settled I made my way up and forward through the mob to the men’s compartment, where I found my 183 sleeping-companions already busily engaged in stowing their hand baggage, getting their new shoes off their blistered feet, changing their fine raiment for old clothes for ship wear, on the advice of those who had crossed the ocean before, or twanging away on guitar or mandolin and thumping the tambourine. The great ship was to have left her dock at five o’clock; but it was after six, and cargo was still coming aboard. The sun filtering through the red haze of the west turned the dull blue of Vesuvius to purple, and the cream of the line of the city’s expanse was touched with pink. As I came on deck into the babel after seeing all the men allotted into beds, the scene about was one of extreme beauty. With the wonderfully colored background I have mentioned, put hurrying small steamers and harbor boats in the middle distance, and for the centre of the composition of your picture behold the enormous bulk of the steamer, her decks black with humanity, and clustered about the sides scores of bumboats selling melons, _fico-indias_, ship-slippers, caps, mirrors, razors, brushes, candy, wine, shawls, seasickness charms, toothache and stomach-ache medicine, knives, pipes, and numberless other things which the childish-minded emigrant imagines are necessary to life aboard ship.