Here the emigrants, after they have been medically examined, given a bath and their clothes disinfected, are detained until the time of embarkation. In company with United States Consul Slocum, from whom I received much valuable information, I visited the emigration building and spent a large part of one day looking into the arrangements and talking, through an interpreter, with emigrants from different parts of the country who were waiting there to embark. Under his guidance I inspected the barracks, furnished with rows upon rows of double-decked iron beds, observed the machinery for disinfecting the clothing of emigrants, visited the kitchen, tasted the soup, and finally saw all the different nationalities march in together to dinner, the women in one row and the men in another. The majority of them were of Magyar nationality; good, wholesome, sturdy, and thrifty people they seemed. They were from the country districts. Some of them were persons of property, who were going to America to earn enough money to pay off mortgages with which their lands were burdened. Very many of them had relatives, a brother, a sister, or a husband already in America, and they seemed to be very well informed about conditions in the new country where they were going. The two most interesting figures that I noticed among the intended emigrants were a tall, pallid, and barefooted girl, with rather delicate and animated features, and a man in a linen blouse which hung down to his knees, his feet and legs incased in a kind of moccason, surmounted with leggings, bound with leather thongs. The girl was a Ruthenian, who was going to meet relatives in America. The man, whom I noticed looking, with what seemed to me rather envious interest and curiosity, at a pair of American shoes on sale at one of the booths in the big common hall, was a Roumanian. Two of the emigrants with whom I talked had been in America before. One of these, who understood a little English, seemed to be a leader among the others. When I asked him the reason why he was going back to America he spoke quite frankly and disparagingly about conditions in the old country. He said it was not so much the wages that led people to emigrate, though they were small enough. But the worst of it was that there were long intervals when it was not possible to get any work. Besides that, the taxes were high. "And then," he added, shrugging his shoulders and throwing out his arm with a gesture of impatience, "it is too tight here." I suspect that this expresses the feeling of a good many emigrants who, returning to their native country, have emigrated a second time. They have found things in the old country "too tight" for comfort. There is still room in America for people to spread out, and grow and find out for themselves what they are capable of. As long as people find things "too tight" they will move on. The plant stretches always toward the light.