utiful
Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. We shall soon be where all men
are alike, and where sorrow is not known.

The good American who hired me to go to his country is to pay me $12
a month, which is immense wages, you know--twenty times as much as one
gets in China. My passage in the ship is a very large sum--indeed, it is
a fortune--and this I must pay myself eventually, but I am allowed ample
time to make it good to my employer in, he advancing it now. For a mere
form, I have turned over my wife, my boy, and my two daughters to my
employer's partner for security for the payment of the ship fare. But my
employer says they are in no danger of being sold, for he knows I will
be faithful to him, and that is the main security.

I thought I would have twelve dollars to, begin life with in America,
but the American Consul took two of them for making a certificate that
I was shipped on the steamer. He has no right to do more than charge the
ship two dollars for one certificate for the ship, with the number
of her Chinese passengers set down in it; but he chooses to force a
certificate upon each and every Chinaman and put the two dollars in
his pocket. As 1,300 of my countrymen are in this vessel, the Consul
received $2,600 for certificates. My employer tells me that the
Government at Washington know of this fraud, and are so bitterly opposed
to the existence of such a wrong that they tried hard to have the
extor--the fee, I mean, legalised by the last Congress;--[Pacific and
Mediterranean steamship bills.(Ed. Mem.)]--but as the bill did not pass,
the Consul will have to take the fee dishonestly until next Congress
makes it legitimate. It is a great and good and noble country, and hates
all forms of vice and chicanery.

We are in that part of the vessel always reserved for my countrymen. It
is called the steerage. It is kept for us, my employer says, because it
is not subject to changes of temperature and dangerous drafts of air.
It is only another instance of the loving unselfishness of the Americans
for all unfortunate foreigners. The steerage is a little crowded, and
rather warm and close, but no doubt it is best for us that it should be
so.

Yesterday our people got to quarrelling among themselves, and the
captain turned a volume of hot steam upon a mass of them and scalded
eighty or ninety of them more or less severely. Flakes and ribbons of
skin came off some of them. There was wild shrieking and struggling