ll
visible to the naked eye, and masquerading here among us of the then
nineteenth century in the guise of the arrival of the immigrant ship.

The scenic setting is in this instance incomparably fine. As we lean on
the coping of the sea wall at the end of the green-swarded Battery, in
the flush of a May sunset that, on the right, throws the Highlands of
the Navesink into dark purple relief and lights the waters of Harbor,
River, and Sound into a softly swelling roseate flood, we may fix our
eyes on the approach to The Narrows and watch the incoming shipping of
the world: the fruit-laden steamer from the Bermudas, the black East
Indiaman heavy with teakwood and spices, the lumberman's barge awash
behind the tow, the old three-masted schooner, low in the water, her
decks loaded with granite from the far-away quarries of Maine. We may
see, if we linger, the swift approach of a curiously foreshortened
ocean steamship, her smokestack belching blackness, and the slower
on-coming of a Norwegian bark, her sails catching the sunset light and
gleaming opaline against the clear blue of the southern horizon. These
last are the immigrant ships.

An hour later in old Castle Garden the North and South of Europe clasp
hands on the very threshold of America. Four thousand feet are planted
on the soil of the New World. Four thousand hands are knocking at its
portals. Two thousand hearts are beating high with hope at prospect of
the New, or palpitating with terror at contact with the Strange.

A thousand tragedies, a thousand comedies are here enacted before our
very eyes: hopes, fears, tears, laughter, shrieks, groans, wailings,
exultant cries, welcoming words, silent all-expressing hand-clasp,
embrace, despairing wide-eyed search, hopeless isolation, the
befriended, the friendless, the home-welcomed, the homeless--all
commingled.

But an official routine soon sorts, separates, pairs, locates; speaks in
Norwegian, speaks in Neapolitan. An hour passes; the dusk falls; the
doors are opened; the two thousand, ticketed, labelled, are to enter
upon the new life. The confusing chatter grows less and less. A child
wails, and is hushed in soft Italian--a Neapolitan lullaby--by its
mother as she sits on a convenient bench and for the first time gives
her little one the breast in a strange land. An old Norwegian, perhaps a
lineal descendant of our Viking visitors some thousand years ago, makes
his way to the door, bent beneath a sack-load of b