Hawtrey's Deputy by Harold Bindloss

A grey haze, thickened by the smoke of the city, drove out across the water when the _Scarrowmania_ lay in the Mersey, with her cable hove short, and the last of the flood tide gurgling against her bows. A trumpeting blast of steam swept high aloft from beside her squat funnel, and the splash of the slowly turning paddles of the couple of steam tugs that lay alongside mingled with the din it made. A gangway from one of them led to the _Scarrowmania's_ forward deck, and a stream of frowsy humanity that had just been released from overpacked emigrant boarding-houses poured up it. There were apparently representatives of all peoples and languages among that unkempt horde -- Britons, Scandinavians, Teutons, Italians, Russians, Poles -- and they moved on in forlorn apathy, like cattle driven to the slaughter.

One wondered, from the look of them, how they had raised their passage money, and how many years' bitter self-denial it had cost them to provide for their transit to the land of promise.