While we were waiting to get an inspector, we had time to buy something to eat from the fruit and cake venders. Though it was mid-October, five cents each was asked for apples to be bought at any street corner in New York for one cent, and ten cents a slice for a thick yellow cake that was the worst mess of coloring-matter, adulterated flour, and soda, I have ever set my teeth into. It was as heavy as a stone and equally gritty. Even the Neapolitan boys would not eat it. On top of all this, when we paid for it in Italian silver money, the venders allowed only seventeen cents for a lire, when taking them at nineteen cents would have been at a profit. Many baskets of such food at such prices were sold to the immigrants that day, for we passed the remainder of the morning and part of the afternoon on the dock, there being four ships laden nearly as heavily as ours in ahead of us, and the barges run by contractors to carry immigrants from the various docks to Ellis Island had more than they could do. So we waited. Few of the people aboard had eaten any breakfast, because it was rumored among them they would land in time for breakfast, and they had been looking forward to a good meal on shore. I think it was about two o’clock when we were finally allowed to go aboard the barges at the end of the pier. I observed two men following my wife and myself and surveying us critically. At the gangplank they stopped us and examined our bit of baggage very carefully. “You may save yourself some inconvenience by telling us who you are,” said the one man very courteously to me. “Who are you?” I said in broken English, expecting the appearance of some grafting game. “I am a special customs inspector, and we spotted you two as queer. What are you?” “We are writers making a study of the immigration question. What did you spot as queer?” “We thought you were dagoes all right, but this lady is the first woman I have ever seen in the steerage with such well-kept finger-nails, and we were a little suspicious.” In the work of hustling the immigrants aboard the barges the dock men displayed great unnecessary roughness, sometimes shoving them violently, prodding them with sticks, etc., and one young Apulian who paused to look around for his father aroused the ire of the dock man nearest him, who planted a by no means gentle kick in his fundamentals, observing,— “Oh, get down there; you’re too damned slow!”