of New York. A row of other vessels lie moored at the quays.
These also have brought immigrants to America and will soon return to
fetch more. They must go backwards and forwards year out and year in to
carry three thousand persons daily to the United States.

Gunnar has packed his things in good time and takes up a favourable
position from which he can observe his fellow-travellers. He has never
heard such a noise and never seen such bustle. The people throng the
gangways, call to one another, haul out their discoloured portmanteaus
and their roped bundles. There are seen Swedes and Germans, Polish and
Russian Jews, Galicians and Croats mingled together, some well dressed
and with overcoats, others in tattered clothes and with a coarse
handkerchief in place of a collar.

Yonder, overlooking New York harbour, stands the colossal statue of
Liberty, a female figure holding a torch in her right hand. When
darkness lies over the earth she throws a dazzling beam of electric
light out over the water, the quays, houses, and ships. But Gunnar
experiences no feeling of freedom as he sets his foot on American soil.
He and all his fellow-travellers are provided with numbered tickets and
marshalled into long compartments in a huge hall. Then they are called
out one after another to be questioned, and a doctor comes and examines
them. Those who suffer from lung disease or other complaint, or being
old and feeble have no prospect of gaining a livelihood, receive a
peremptory order of exclusion on grey paper and must return by the next
vessel to their fatherland. The others who pass the examination proceed
in small steamers to the great city, where, among the four millions of
New York, they vanish like chaff before the wind.

From whatever land they may come they always find fellow-countrymen in
New York, for this city is a conglomeration of all the peoples of the
world, and seventy different languages are spoken in it. A third of its
inhabitants have been born in foreign countries. In Brooklyn, the
quarter on Long Island, there are whole streets where only Swedes live.
In the "Little Italy" quarter live more Italians than there are in
Naples, in the "Chinese Town" there are five thousand Chinese, and even
Jews from Russia and Poland have their own quarter. Gunnar soon finds
that New York is more complicated than he supposed when he was rolling
out on the Atlantic.

Meanwhile he decides to take it easy at first, and to learn his wa