elonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who,
wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the ship. He was an
ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-white hair in a tangle,
his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to and fro with so
natural a step, and fell and picked himself up again with such grace and
good-humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful when he was in
motion. To meet him, crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment
to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin cup, was to meet a little
triumph of the human species. Even when his mother and the rest of his
family lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their midst
and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness of infancy.

Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but few advances. We
discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces of
information, naming our trades, what we hoped to find in the new world,
or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we condoled
together over the food and the vileness of the steerage. One or two had
been so near famine, that you may say they had run into the ship with
the devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for the best in the
best of possible steamers. But the majority were hugely discontented.
Coming as they did from a country in so low a state as Great Britain,
many of them from Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good as
dead, and many having long been out of work, I was surprised to find
them so dainty in their notions. I myself lived almost exclusively on
bread, porridge, and soup, precisely as it was supplied to them, and
found it, if not luxurious, at least sufficient. But these working men
were loud in their outcries. It was not "food for human beings," it was
"only fit for pigs," it was "a disgrace." Many of them lived almost
entirely upon biscuit, others on their own private supplies, and some
paid extra for better rations from the ship. This marvellously changed
my notion of the degree of luxury habitual to the artisan. I was
prepared to hear him grumble, for grumbling is the traveller's pastime;
but I was not prepared to find him turn away from a diet which was
palatable to myself. Words I should have disregarded, or taken with a
liberal allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can be no
question of the sincerity of his disgust.

With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise. A singl