It was not long before we wound down to the little station, and day began to break in the east, turning the cloud of vapor over Stromboli into the semblance of a huge pink rose growing up out of the island volcano. Many of the people from the country about were gathered to see their own friends off, for there was quite a party by this time. Soon the train crept around the coast from Milazzo and brought up with a jerk and a blast of the conductor’s horn. Here farewells were brief. I heard one of the Socosa boys’ father cursing the train because it was the agent of the separation from his son, and then out of the hurly-burly came a slamming of compartment doors, cries of “_Pronte! Pronte!_” another blast of the horn, and we were hurried away to Messina. It was at the station that Antonio’s first wrestling-match with the mountain of the party’s baggage occurred. At Santa Lucia there had been abundant willing hands to pile it on the train, and no other baggage with which to confuse it. Also, nothing had been said about excess charges. At Messina it was ripped open by the city customs officials, then hustled from place to place till at last it was dispatched to the North German Lloyd office, and Antonio emerged from the encounter a dripping wreck of his former immaculate self. When we next saw it, it was piled into a barge, and standing guard over it was a uniformed government official who begged piteously before he departed for enough money to buy his dinner, and was well enough satisfied with thirty _centesimi_ (about six cents). I have previously described the operations of the _questura_ of Messina. Passports in hand, the entire party joined the great mass of people from all parts of eastern Sicily crowded into the steamship broker’s office. Here each person was compelled to make a declaration, which declaration answers the twenty-two questions that are propounded regularly at Ellis Island. When the Socosa boys, in answer to the question as to whether they had work promised or not, said that they had, _the agent advised them to answer this question in the negative_. When Giunta and Curro said they expected no one to meet them, they were advised to get some one, and so on through the group. The steamship broker’s agent, in filling out the blanks of this declaration, thus fortified the emigrant in the weak places of his case for admission, and if the emigrant is turned back he has no claim for damages against the brokers. Numbers of suits were formerly brought and won, but under the present system none have been successful, and in cases where the returned emigrant is able to pay for the passage on his deportation the broker can force him to do so.