re should be penned into a
little space of their own in the sort of pit made by the narrowing deck
at the bow. They seemed to be all foreigners, and if any had made their
fortunes in our country they were hiding their prosperity in the return
to their own. They could hardly have come to us more shabby and squalid
than they were going away; but he thought their average less apathetic
than that of the saloon passengers, as he leaned over the rail and looked
down at them. Some one had brought out an electric battery, and the
lumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughing as they
writhed with the current. A young mother seated flat on the deck, with
her bare feet stuck out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughed
and shouted with the rest; a man with his head tied in a shawl walked
about the pen and smiled grotesquely with the well side of his
toothache-swollen face. The owner of the battery carried it away, and a
group of little children, with blue eyes and yellow hair, gathered in the
space he had left, and looked up at a passenger near March who was eating
some plums and cherries which he had brought from the luncheon table. He
began to throw the fruit down to them, and the children scrambled for it.

An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face, said, "I shouldn't
want a child of mine down there."

"No," March responded, "it isn't quite what one would choose for one's
own. It's astonishing, though, how we reconcile ourselves to it in the
case of others."

"I suppose it's something we'll have to get used to on the other side,"
suggested the stranger.

"Well," answered March, "you have some opportunities to get used to it on
this side, if you happen to live in New York," and he went on to speak of
the raggedness which often penetrated the frontier of comfort where he
lived in Stuyvesant Square, and which seemed as glad of alms in food or
money as this poverty of the steerage.

The other listened restively like a man whose ideals are disturbed. "I
don't believe I should like to live in New York, much," he said, and
March fancied that he wished to be asked where he did live. It appeared
that he lived in Ohio, and he named his town; he did not brag of it, but
he said it suited him. He added that he had never expected to go to
Europe, but that he had begun to run down lately, and his doctor thought
he had better go out and try Carlsbad.

March said, to invite his further confidence, that this w