On my first visit to Messina I had the pleasure of intimate knowledge of the discovery of a bold fraud, and the arrest and punishment of the thief. He was a man of fair appearance, who had for three years made a practice of stopping emigrants just before they were about to go aboard the steamer by means of the small boats in the harbor, and demanding if they had had their tickets stamped “by the American doctor.” The frightened emigrant, knowing that somewhere in the process he would encounter “the American doctor,” to him an object of dread, would reply that he had not. The party would then be taken to a small office in an alleyway opening off the water front and a stamp put on the ticket for which the victims would be charged three francs sixty, about seventy cents each. Mr. Charles M. Caughy, the American consul at Messina, caught this fellow and saw to it that he was soundly punished. Our party escaped with a few minor mishaps, thanks to the vigilance of Antonio and myself. One of the boys fell a victim to a fake street dentist who had a carriage, a set of tools and a professional air. He related the sufferings with toothache experienced by emigrants on the Atlantic, and advised the extraction of all bad teeth. One old woman from Catania had three taken out at a franc each. While I was trying to get a photograph of the fakir one of our boys got into the carriage, and the dentist was so eager to have me get a good, full view of his face that he yanked out one of the boy’s perfectly good teeth. I am glad the film got torn. We lunched in a little restaurant off the Via Umberto, entertained by really good music from a beggar violinist who was accompanied by a woman and little girl, both of them cursed by trachoma. We were disappointed in meeting the Papalia family from Montforte-Spadafora, in fact they came on the next steamer, and for some reason Giuseppe Cardillo’s father had decided that Giuseppe and his party should wait; thus we lost at the outset some interesting members from our group as planned. I improved the opportunity to complete some investigations in Messina concerning the smuggling of trachomatic emigrants, and will state what I learned in a later chapter, where the information is collected. The fine Navigazione Generale steamer _Reina Margherita_ was the one on which we were to travel to Naples. She went first to Reggio di Calabrie to get the crowd there gathered from Greece, Syria, Turkey, Apulia and Calabria. There were not many of the Orientals, and a large part of them expected to sail on the _Citta di Napoli_, of the La Veloce Line, leaving Naples before we did on the _Prinzessin Irene_. I went over and saw them come aboard, as some of our friends would be there. Some gay parties came down to the dock in _carretas_ and on foot, singing and beating tambourines, and one of these brought Gaetano Disalvo, a boy from Scilla going to join his uncle in Buffalo.