. You see a ticket "S. I." on the lame man, which means
that he is to go to a Board of Special Inquiry, with the chances of
being debarred, or sent back home. On another, as you pass, you notice a
ticket "L. P. C.," which signifies the dreaded decision, "liable to
become public charge"--a decision that means deportation.

[Sidenote: The Three Stairs of Separation]

All this time you have been guided. Now you are directed to a desk where
your railroad ticket-order is stamped; next to a banker's desk, where
your money is exchanged for American money; and finally you are motioned
to the right stairway of three, this leading to the railroad barge room.
Here your baggage is checked and your ticket provided, a bag of food is
offered you, and then you are taken on board a barge which will convey
you to the railroad station. You have left your fellow-voyagers
abruptly, all save the railroad-ticketed like yourself. Had you been
destined for New York, you would have gone down the left stairway and
been free to take the ferryboat for the Battery. If you had expected
friends to meet you, the central stairway would have led you to the
waiting room for that purpose. Those three stairways are called "The
Stairs of Separation," and there families are sometimes ruthlessly
separated without warning, when bound for different destinations.

[Sidenote: Careful Supervision]

The officers, who have treated you courteously, in strong contrast to
the steamship and dock employees, keep track of you until you are safely
on board an immigrant car, bound for the place where your relatives are.
Your ideas of great New York are limited, but you have been saved by
this official supervision from being swindled by sharpers or enticed
into evil. You are practically in charge of the railway company, as you
have been of the steamship company, until you are deposited at the
station where you expect to make your home. You are ready to believe, by
this time, that America is at least a spacious country, with room enough
in it for all who want to come. At the same time you will admit, as you
recall some of your fellow-passengers in the steerage, that there should
not be room in the country for those who ought not to come--not only the
diseased and insane, crippled and consumptive, who are shut out by the
law, but also the delinquent and depraved, whose presence means added
ignorance and crime. You only wish the inspectors could have seen some
of those shamel