It was with keen disappointment that I saw a party of three persons, an old woman, her daughter and the daughter’s small boy, who were going by the _Citta di Napoli_, brought off the _Reina Margherita_ and hurried away with the other Veloce people. I had observed their diseased eyes the evening before, and had warned all of our party to keep away from them; but the young woman had made friends with one of our neighbors, to whom she confided the fact that this was her third trip to Naples with her mother and her boy. She had tried twice before to go to America, but all had been turned down on account of trachoma, and sent back to Messina, where they lived. Now, by arranging to perform that indefinite process I heard so much about, “Pay some money to some people,” she fully expected to get through at Naples and to be landed in New York. I had planned to check up every step of her process and see if she really did get through with the old woman and the child; but now she was hustled away, and we were left standing helpless. I had the name she gave to our neighbor, and the address in Messina, but either the neighbor was mistaken or the name fictitious. Soon after they had gone, an old man with a swarm of young clerks appeared, and, calling the roll of the party, issued tickets which were good for daily rations, while we were held in Naples, at the North German Lloyd’s contract restaurant, the Trattoria Retifilero in Via Lanzieri. It was a long, tedious process, involving much argument and searching for passports, tickets and papers. When the old man was finished, he and his henchmen marshaled the crowd, divided it off into groups amid a wild uproar, and each group of thirty or forty followed one of the young clerks into the Capitaneria, where they were led before the city customs officials, who ransacked their baggage for _comestibles_. A number of the members of our party were intensely agitated over the performance, it being their first experience, and little Nastasia, who had wine and cheese in his box, was wild with fright. He was afraid he would be arrested, or something would happen that would prevent his going. A few times before, I had seen evidences of this fear among others of our party, and I soon realized that _what makes the emigrant so meek in the face of outrageous brutalities, so open to the wiles of sharpers, so thoroughly disconcerted and bewildered in the face of an examination, is his terrible dread of not being allowed to enter America. He would as soon think of cutting off a hand as doing anything that “would get him into trouble._”