officers among the steerage-passengers, while he tried
to definitely decide upon what means he might employ to keep from losing
sight of the two people in whom his interest had grown to be so great,
after they were diverted by the formalities of immigration laws from the
line of travel he would naturally follow when the ship tied up.

"The immigrants are sent to Ellis Island," he explained to Mrs.
Vanderlyn. "A case of sheep and goats, all right, according to the
tenets of this land of liberty and lucre. If you've got money you're a
sheep. Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, has wide-open arms for you. No
one tries to stop your entrance. If you've none, why you're the goat
and everybody butts you."

"Your English is as hard to understand as any of the foreign
languages!" his mother chided. "Every other word is slang. I haven't
an idea what you mean." Down upon the steerage-deck Moresco, after
the faint cheering, was declaiming loudly, now, about the towering
statue and the liberty she symbolizes.

Towards the mighty effigy the old flute-player's eyes were also
turned, but the emotions it aroused in him were very different from
those which the Italian laid his claim to. To him she did not stand
for license, but for a freedom from that mysterious worry, which, in
London, had been so horridly persistent, which had reached an
intolerable climax in Hyde Park, that day when he had run across the
German with the turned-up moustache, and from which the journey to
America was a veritable flight. The Giant Woman of the Bay would prove
to be to him, the old musician fondly hoped, what her designer had
intended her to be to all the worried, fleeing people of all the
balance of the earth--a great torch-bearer who would light the way to
peace and plenty, free from the social and political turmoil and
oppression of the worn-out lands across the sea. He drew a breath of
crisp air into his lungs, held his daughter closer to his side, took
off his hat and stood agaze while the brisk wind, strengthening for
the moment, blew the folk around him free of steerage odors, waved his
long grey hair about his forehead and flapped his long grey coat about
his legs until its tails snapped.

An instant later and combined assaults of manifold officials, pregnant
with prying questions and suspicious glances, had driven all thoughts
from his mind and those of other steerage passengers that America
meant freedom. Never had he been so suddenly and vigoro