At last the whistle blew, the American vice-consul went ashore with his official papers, the lighters cast off, the ports in the railing were closed, and the after gangplank withdrawn. Then the screw began its slow thrashing, and soon we slid out by the light on the end of the breakwater, leaving behind a dim vision of a city of rose and white towers clasped in bold hills with artificed faces that heaved up and rolled backward until lost in the bosom of the night rushing on from the east. The great ship attained its full speed, and we glided by Ischia, Capri, the fortresses, the prisons, and the vineyards, till only a twinkling light high up on a point told where the last land lay. Never had the tumult on deck ceased. Singing, crying, laughing, quarrelling, complaining of hunger, the fact that they were at last off for America seemed to rouse in all a desire to say something or make a noise. Some few women who fancied that already they were seasick, though the ship merely quivered now and then from the motion of the screw, sat about with their heads on their husbands’ shoulders. Now a greater stir was brought about by the ringing of the bell that announced supper for the steerage. The majority of the emigrants had had but a hasty bite at breakfast-time twelve hours before, and, being healthy and hearty, were ravenously hungry. From the steerage galley, which was on the level of the main deck forward under the fo’c’s’le head, the cooks and stewards began to lug great tanks of food and baskets of bread. These they lined up in a narrow passage-way between the hatch and the bulkhead of the galley. The tanks were huge tinned things holding about twenty-five gallons each, and from the first there was ladled out macaroni Neapolitan, from the next chunks of beef the size of one’s fist, from the next red wine, and then came the bread-baskets and the boiled-potato tank. As we had come aboard and got the blankets, as I have told, we were each handed a red card bearing an inscription that it was “Good for One Ration,” just as on the _Lahn_, and advised that the passengers form themselves into groups of six and elect a _capo di rancio_, who should manage the mess, and would, when elected and given the six ration cards of his group, be issued a two-gallon pan and a gallon flask-bucket for coffee or wine. When the blanket was enrolled, each person found inside a fork, spoon, pint tin cup, and a flaring six-inch-wide, two-inch-deep pan out of which to eat, identical with those on the _Lahn_.