aply in the steerage of a slow ship toward America, a
part of a large company of needy aliens seeking a new home in what
they thought the land of promise.

As the voyage neared its end he saw with some dismay that the old man
had managed to make enemies among the emigrants by his aloofness. The
sea was very smooth, these days, and, under smiling skies the
steerage-deck was swarming. The stewardess announced that but one of
all the seasick passengers, a young English girl, was left in the
infirmary; the only other call for the ship's doctor came from a
mother for her tiny babe of two or three months which had been
stricken with some increasing ailment before they had embarked upon
the ship. The emigrants were making merry daily, from early morning
until nine or ten of evenings; there were few moments when from their
part of the ship some crude music was not rising.

Concertinas, mouth-organs, a badly-mastered violin gave forth their
notes from time to time, their harshness softened by the mingling of
the waves' lap on the vessel's sides. Now and then the first-class
passengers looked down with amused curiosity upon rude dances, the
dancers' merriment enhanced by stumbling lurches born of the vessel's
slow, long rollings on the sea's vast, smooth-surfaced swells.

The old man and his daughter never joined in these crude pleasurings
and John found in this a certain comfort which he did not try to
analyze. His mother, also watching now and then, observed it, too, and
felt her interest in them increasing. Two days before the slow old
ship was due to reach New York she had almost made her mind up to
investigate the pair. Should she find that they were worthy, she told
John (that is, should she find they could, in any way, be useful in
her campaign of next summer, which, already, she was planning) she
might try to help them in New York. Her resentment of John's interest
in them had faded. If they were ordinary emigrants he would not see
them after the ship docked, if they were of enough importance to be
useful to her, if they had influential friends abroad, the more he saw
of them the better. Mrs. Vanderlyn was not a mercenary woman. The only
gold she worshiped had been beaten into coronets; of that which had
been minted she had plenty. She did not envy fortunes, though her envy
of position was unbounded.

"You might make a little inquiry," she told her son. "If they should
really have friends among the aristocracy--"

I