d as prosperous people. They always had good food in the
larder and meat on Sunday, which was more than many had. They were the
owners of feather beds, while many never slept on anything but straw.
True they could not raise the passage money to America until father
came and earned it--that would have been riches in Wales. Now we were
in America hungry and penniless, and hard was the bed that we should lie
on.

From Pittsburgh father had sent us railroad tickets, and these tickets
were waiting for us at the railroad office. All we would have to do
would be to hold our hunger in check until we should reach Hubbard,
Ohio, where a kinsman had established a home. But while mother was
piloting her family to the depot, two of the children got lost. She had
reached Castle Garden with six children and her household goods. Now her
goods were gone and only four of the children remained. My sister was
ten and I was eight; we were the oldest. The baby, one year old, and the
next, a toddler of three, mother had carried in her arms. But two boys,
Walter and David, four and six years old, had got lost in the traffic.
Mother took the rest of us to a hotel and locked us in a room while she
went out to search for the missing ones. For two days she tramped the
streets visiting police stations and making inquiry everywhere. At night
she would return to us and report that she had found no trace of little
Walter and David. To try to picture the misery of those scenes is beyond
me. I can only say that the experience instilled in me a lasting terror.
The fear of being parted from my parents and from my brothers and
sisters, then implanted in my soul, has borne its fruit in after-life.

Finally mother found the boys in a rescue home for lost children.
Brother David, curly-haired and red-cheeked, had so appealed to the
policeman who found them that he had made application to adopt the boy
and was about to take him to his own home.

After finding the children, mother stood on Broadway and, gazing at the
fine buildings and the good clothes that all classes wore in America,
she felt her heart swell with hope. And she said aloud: "This is the
place for my boys."

Every one had treated her with kindness. A fellow countryman had lent
her money to pay the hotel bill, telling her she could pay it back after
she had joined her husband. And so we had passed through the gateway
of the New World as thousands of other poor families had done. And our
tempo