oni piteously not to go. He was her only surviving son. Vito
was dead. Let him but wait a little while and she would not be there to
stand in his way. Then the priest added his personal assurance that it
would be for the best, and the mother finally gave way. Toni was obliged
to tear himself away by force from the arms of the old woman lying upon
the bed, and her feeble sobs echoed in his ears as he trudged down the
road with the scarf Nicoletta had worked about his neck, and a small
bundle of his tools and most precious possessions on his shoulder. A
couple of miles farther on came another harrowing parting with his
betrothed, and from the top of the next rise beyond he could see
Nicoletta still standing at the crossroads gazing pitifully after him.
Thus many an Italian, for good or ill, has left the place of his birth
for the mysterious land of the Golden West.

The voyage was for Antonio an unalloyed agony of seasickness and
homesickness, and when at last the great vessel steamed slowly up the
North River, her band playing and the emigrants crowding eagerly to her
sides, he had hardly spirit enough left to raise his eyes to the
mountains of huge buildings from whose craters the white smoke rose
slowly and blew away in great wind-torn clouds. Yet he felt some of the
awakening enthusiasm of his comrades, and when once his feet touched
earth again it was not long before he almost forgot his sufferings upon
the ocean in his feverish anxiety to lose no time in beginning to save
the money which should reunite him to Nicoletta and his mother. As soon
as the vessel had docked a blustering Italian came among the emigrants
and tagged a few dozen of them, including Antonio, with large blue
labels, and then led them in a long, straggling line across the
gangplank and marched them through the muddy streets to the railroad
train. Here they huddled in a dirty car filled with smoke and were
whirled with frightful speed for hours through a flat and smiling
country. The noise, the smoke and the unaccustomed motion made Antonio
ill again, and when the train stopped at Lambertville, New Jersey, the
padrone had difficulty in rousing him from the animal-like stupor into
which he had fallen.

The Italians crowded together upon the platform, gazing helplessly at
one another and at the padrone, who was cursing them for a lot of stupid
fools, and bidding them get upon a flat car that stood upon a siding.
Antonio had to be pushed upon it by m