an immigrant. You look across the sea with the same yearning in your eyes as is in my heart, for we are both homesick."
She was no longer cross, after this, and because another woman was sharing in her misery that misery became lighter. She began to tell me of her sorrow. She had buried her second baby in two weeks, because of the heat. Her lap was now empty. She spat viciously on the water. "That is what I have in my heart for America—that!" and again she spat.
I volunteered an account of my own disillusionment about America; and there we sat at the edge of the Battery, two sad immigrants, telling each other of the beauties we had left behind, and of the difficulties we had to fight in the present. If I had then known a little of the history of America, I might have told her of the first immigrants, of how much they had to suffer and endure, and for what the present Thanksgiving Day stood. I might have told her more of their hardships, and how they had had to plant corn on the graves of their dear ones, so that the Indians should not find out how many of them had died—but I was as ignorant as she, and we only knew of our own homesickness and misery.
The heat had started early in May, and it kept on getting hotter and hotter, with only sudden and savage thunderstorms, which passed over
