“These Italians are the worst of the lot. They are a dangerous element. Stick a knife in you in a minute. Look at that villainous-looking fellow standing right here on this box, smoking a cigar.” The Wise and Superior Four turned their eyes on me, for it was I the banker meant. He went on. “There is a fair sample of your Mafia member. Criminal? Why, criminal instinct is written in every line of his head and face. See the bravado in the way he holds his shoulders and the nasty look in his uneasy eyes. I’ll bet he has a bad record a yard long behind him in Italy, and he will double the length of it in America. By George, I should hate to meet that man at night in a lonesome spot.” I could not resist the temptation. I stepped over to the other end of the box, within a few feet of him, looked up, and said: “Pardon me; but you are one of the fools who are not safe from their own errors, even in a daylight throng.” At noon I had an opportunity for which I had been waiting: fine, high sunlight on a dinner crowd, and the purser in charge. This man was a huge fellow, tall and heavy, as powerful as an ox, and one would have thought the two silver stripes on his sleeve were the decorations of a Czar. At every meal, when he superintended the ladling out to the _capo di rancio_ corps and their helpers, he had taken upon himself the handling of the crowd. He had no set system of lining them up as the men on the _Lahn_ had, but would pick out groups of three and four as the fancy occurred to him and pass them on to the servers, pouring forth a flood of directions, commands, and oaths in German which of course no one but his own men understood. His use of Italian seemed to be limited to “Avanti! Avanti!” which seemed to mean to him, “Hurry up!” “Come on!” “Stand back there!” “Let me pass!” “That is enough!” “Come back here!” “Don’t push!”—and forty other things. The crowd in the rear always pushed the front ranks up nearer the entrance to the “Lane of Food,” as the Italians dubbed it, and this seemed to irritate the Czar immeasurably. Forgetting that it was all the fault of his lack of system and constant change of method, he would charge into the press like an angry bull, and clear a lane through them by hurling his own huge bulk into the mass of human beings. The unfortunate feature of this was that the Italians, with their natural deference, allowed the women and children who were doing _capo di rancio_ duty to have the foremost places. I had seen him hurl about women with babies in their arms, and children clinging to their skirts, as if they were mere bundles of rags, and I determined that he should be reckoned with, and, as evidence, sought a photograph of one of his charges in the very act. Taking a position on the top after rail of the fo’c’s’le head on the port side, I set the shutter at one fifteenth of a second and gave the diaphragm a sixteen opening. One of the pictures I took, which is herewith reproduced, tells its own story.