would kill me.' And
one day, after wandering clandestinely through the steamer, he comes
to me with a gesture of surprise and this: 'Do you know, there are
passengers who sleep in bunks below, over and across each other? I saw
them, billah! And I was told they pay more than we do for such a low
passage--the fools! Think on it. I peeped into a little room, a dingy,
smelling box, which had in it six berths placed across and above each
other like the shelves of the reed manchons we build for our
silk-worms at home. I wouldn't sleep in one of them, billah! even
though they bribe me. This bovine fragrance, the sight of these fine
horses, the rioting of the wind above us, should make us forget the
brutality of the stewards. Indeed, I am as content, as comfortable
here, as are their Excellencies in what is called the Salon. Surely,
we are above them--at least, in the night. What matters it, then, if
ours is called the Fourth Class and theirs the Primo. Wherever one is
happy, Shakib, there is the Primo.'"

But this happy humour is assailed at Marseilles. His placidity and
stolid indifference are rudely shaken by the sharpers, who differ
only from the boatmen of Beirut in that they wear pantaloons and
intersperse their Arabic with a jargon of French. These brokers,
like rapacious bats, hover around the emigrant and before his
purse is opened for the fourth time, the trick is done. And with
what ceremony, you shall see. From the steamer the emigrant is led
to a dealer in frippery, where he is required to doff his baggy
trousers and crimson cap, and put on a suit of linsey-woolsey and a
hat of hispid felt: end of First Act; open the purse. From the dealer
of frippery, spick and span from top to toe, he is taken to the
hostelry, where he is detained a fortnight, sometimes a month, on
the pretext of having to wait for the best steamer: end of Second Act;
open the purse. From the hostelry at last to the steamship agent,
where they secure for him a third-class passage on a fourth-class
ship across the Atlantic: end of Third Act; open the purse. And now
that the purse is almost empty, the poor emigrant is permitted to
leave. They send him to New York with much gratitude in his heart
and a little trachoma in his eyes. The result being that a month
later they have to look into such eyes again. But the purse of the
distressed emigrant now being empty,--empty as his hopes and
dreams,--the rapacious bats hover not around him, and the door