Monday morning we were nearing Gibraltar. The peaked rock rose up out of the clouds in the west nearly an hour before we slid around Europa Point and came to anchor with the fortress frowning upon us and British warships lying all about. The tender of the company steamed out at once, bringing passengers and mail, and into the steerage there came quite a number of Spaniards, Portuguese, a Moor or two, etc. The bumboat-men swarmed about the ship on both sides, and came up and over the rail like monkeys, hauling up stuff from their boats in baskets. By the knuckles of Mars! What a joy to get good Dutch, Havana, and Egyptian tobacco once more. In Italy the government so monopolizes the sale of tobacco that the demand for good cigars and pipe tobacco is very slight; therefore to find anything fit to smoke in a strange city is like hunting up lost heirs. When one does get a good Havana cigar in Rome it is as dry as an undertaker’s eye. In addition to tobacco we laid in here a good supply of fruit and nuts, and if it had not been for our very limited baggage could have driven some fine bargains in smuggled goods. While we lay there taking in the last lighter-loads of freight, the hatches were open and the crew at work on deck, so that, with all the emigrants up from the compartments to see the sights, the space forward of the hurricane deck was one seething, jostling mass of people. I improved the opportunity to get my kodak out while the sun was bright and the ship still, and had climbed up on a refrigerator by the forward rail of the hurricane deck, and with my camera hidden was waiting my chance to get a group without having them all looking at the lens. I had given out my occupation as photographer to explain to the ship’s people and my fellow-passengers my possession and use of a camera. They are not often seen in the steerage. As I stood there two men and two women from among the first-class passengers came by and paused at the rail to look down on the steerage crowd. The one man, a well-fed elderly person, I have since ascertained is an influential Western banker and politician. One woman is his wife, the other woman a friend of the first, while the other man is an architect of some repute. Said Mrs. Banker: “Dear me, just see all those children. What dirty little imps they are.” A tin-cupful of drinking-water to cleanse a family of faces! Answered Mrs. Banker’s friend: “Oh, terrible to think of admitting such people wholesale into the United States. Just look at the slovenly dresses of those women, wrinkled and dirty—ugh.” Sleeping in one’s skirts does not improve their freshness! “Yes, yes,” observed the architect, “there ought to be a stop put to it: they are a menace to our civilization.” His grandfather came over to Montreal in the coop of a French sailing-ship about 1840.