ith rows of bunks, steel skeleton
bunks three tiers high, the top tier just under the ceiling. In each was
a thin, dirty mattress and blanket. In some of these men were already
asleep, breathing hard, snoring and wheezing. Others were crowded around
their bags intent on something I could not see. Many were smoking, the
air was blue. Some were almost naked, and the smells of their bodies
filled the place. It was already stifling.

"Had enough?" asked our young guide, with a grin.

"No," I said, with an answering superior smile. "We'll stay a while and
get it all."

And after a little more talk he left us.

"How do you like our home?" asked Joe.

"I'm here now," I said grimly. "Go ahead and show me. And try to believe
that I want to be shown."

"All right, here comes our breakfast."

Two stokers were bringing in a huge boiler. They set it down on the
dirty floor. It was full of a greasy, watery soup with a thick, yellow
scum on the top, through which chunks of pork and potato bobbed up here
and there.

"This is scouse," Joe told me. Men eagerly dipped tin cups in this and
gulped it down. The chunks of meat they ate with their hands. They ate
sitting on bunks or standing between them. Some were wedged in close
around a bunk in which lay a sleeper who looked utterly dead to the
world. His face was white.

"He reminds me," said Joe, "of a fellow whose bunk was once next to
mine. He was shipped at Buenos Ayres, where the crimps still handle the
business. A crimp had carried this chap on board, dumped him, got his
ten dollars and left. The man was supposed to wake up at sea and shovel
coal. But this one didn't. The second day out some one leaned over and
touched him and yelled. The crimp had sold us a dead one."

As Joe said this he stared down at the sleeper, a curious tensity in his
eyes.

"Joe, how did you ever stand this life?"

My own voice almost startled me, it sounded so suddenly tense and
strained. Joe turned and looked at me searchingly, with a trace of that
old affection of his.

"I didn't, Kid," he said gruffly. "The two years almost got me. And
that's what happens to most of 'em here. Half of 'em," he added, "are
down-and-outers when they start. They're what the factories and mills
and all the rest of this lovely modern industrial world throw out as no
more wanted. So they drift down here and take a job that nobody else
will take, it's so rotten, and here they have one week of hell and
another we