A Yankee in the Far East

by George Hoyt Allen

I told them to keep it; that nothing but a rebate of thirteen pounds looked good to me. "Furthermore," I said, "if the line slips a cog this trip across and forgets to make steerage passage home one continual round of pleasure, if, perchance, I should feel like shaking steerage before we get across, I'll try to work the purser to let me eat first and sleep in the steerage. Coming home from Naples in the rush season, holding a first cabin ticket, I once had to accept second cabin berth, but was allowed to eat in first cabin."

I was willing to shake steerage at Liverpool before ever boarding the ship. A madder lot of Americans I never met, of whom there were about seven hundred, mixed in with about three hundred immigrants. Hours were consumed to get that thousand steerage passengers aboard the tender. No effort was made to separate them. The great majority being Americans with passports to be examined, immigrants and Americans were all held standing for hours in a hot, broiling sun, a congested herd of humanity, while the tedious task of examining the passports was carried on at the gang-plank—a task that could have been done in comfort in a large and commodious room on the wharf, where there were the accommodations for at least our women and children to be seated while immigrants and Americans were separated; after which both bodies could have passed on board in comfort and with dispatch.

But when we reached the ship, wow! a howl went up. We had consumed the biggest part of the day in getting from the wharf to the ship via tender, and we struck it at supper-time. Seven hundred Americans who had been told that steerage home would be a picnic!

Gur-r-r—"picnic!"

Filth! Stench! Vermin! Our illusion was dispelled.

Now there is a streak of yellow in almost everyone. Once in a while a noble, self-sacrificing character is born who had rather suffer with his kind than be delivered, like Daniel, and Joseph, and Moses, and who, by persistently sticking to exalted ideals, win out, so that all ages ring with extolling their characters.

But most of that kind die young.

There are moments when I feel that I'd like to be grand, and good, and noble, like Daniel, and Joseph, and Moses. Then the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil get in between and I slip back. Every time after slipping back from those noble aspirations and high aims a particular and special brand of hard luck strikes me. My heart beat in sympathy with that crowd of seven hundred Americans traveling steerage with whom I had cast my lot; but after the first meal I decided that I'd try to shake them. So I went up first to ask the purser to let me at least eat first cabin.

"Purser," I said, "I am booked to travel home steerage—"—that haughty individual interrupted me with: "You're a third-class passenger, then, on this ship," and he looked at me as if I were an angleworm.

"Even so," I said; "but——" and I was reaching into my pocket to get at the document to prove to him that I had paid for a first-class passage.