Late that afternoon we ran rapidly into murky weather and before long encountered a stiff gale, for August. It lasted all night and all the next day. I have been on ships steadier than the _Lahn_, and this gale took her nearly on the beam. The seasickness in the steerage was nothing short of frightful. Fortunately the people had had very little to eat—few of them much breakfast on sailing-day and very few any supper—so the most undesirable feature of a seasick crowd was limited. Also many of the third-class passengers had profited by the experiences of former voyages, and were able to take care of themselves and make less bother for their neighbors. Nevertheless, the compartments, in which the people were compelled to stay by reason of the deck weather, were in a state in describing which no good purpose is served. The steerage stewards were constantly busy with hose, sand buckets, brooms, etc. Not only were we seeking general information, but we were hoping to get trace of some southern Italian family about to emigrate, in order to make them, as planned, the central feature of our analytical study of particular experiences; so, as the days went by, I inquired of each new person with whom I fell into conversation if he knew of such a family. Nearly every other man was either going over to get a wife for himself or already had a family in Italy and expected to return in October, or, if not then, in the following May. In a short time we had twenty families under consideration, but none of them seemed to be exactly typical; they were all too small, too large, too rich or from provinces that sent few emigrants. There was a group of eight Greeks aboard who had been denied admission to the United States and were part of twenty-two men, women and children of mixed races who had arrived in New York on the _Lahn_ and other North German Lloyd ships and were being returned by the company. The leader of the group was a huge fellow with very curly hair and beard who rejoiced in the name of Garareikophalous, and the third day I had a long chat with him with the aid of an interpreter from among our fellow passengers.