Page:How and Why Library 080.jpg



XIX. The "Front Door" of America
The very nicest time to get home to America is on a summer morning. You have been on the water nearly a week. You have crossed the same Atlantic ocean, that the white children and the black child crossed, so long ago, to find new homes. As you lie half awake in the bed that is built in the wall of your tiny cabin, some one on deck cries "Land!"

You jump out of bed, scramble into your clothes, and run to the upper deck. All the first cabin passengers are there, leaning on the rail. Far off you see, low down on the water, what looks like a bank of blue cloud. Some are looking at it through opera glasses. The sun strikes across the water. The thin morning fog flies away. Now you see green grass and trees, on the cloud bank. On the other side of a narrow strip of water is a long, sandy point with a lighthouse on it. A cheer goes up. Handkerchiefs are waved. Everybody is glad to get home. Slowly the big steamer moves through the narrow strait. All at once you are in the wide harbor of New York. This is The front door of America. Near the entrance to the harbor, on an island park, is a great statue of Liberty, holding a torch in the air.

What a different scene this is from what the Dutch children found here, three hundred years ago. Then this harbor was a wilderness of wooded shores, with only a few Indian canoes on the waters. Now, the long narrow island in the mouth of the Hudson river, and the shores around the harbor, are covered with high buildings, as far as you can see. The waters are arched with bridges, and crowded with ships.

If all this looks strange to you, think what it must look like to poor foreign people who came to America to find new homes. New ones come almost every day. You didn't know there were thousands of them on your ship, did you? A great ocean steamer is five or six stories deep, you remember. You have lived in the top story, or first cabin. You have never seen the people below you. You can see them now, as they go ashore over the gang plank, if you stand by the deck rail and look down.

A crowd of the strangest looking people pour over the gang plank from the third deck, or steerage. They look like little bits