Welcome, Stranger! A Tribute to Ellis Island
I
I AM English. My name is Agnes Miller. My home, in Saint-Anne’s-bythe-Sea, near Preston, Lancashire, had been broken up by the death of my mother and my health depleted by twelve years as a nurse, beginning with the strenuous years of the war. It was deemed advisable that I have several months of rest and change. England is a sad place for me, for the war took heavy toll among my friends. Relatives, girlhood sweethearts, brothers and husbands of my women friends — so many are gone that under the rouge of our gayest moments there is a complexion of settled sorrow.
I turned toward America, fresh, vital, buoyant young country that she is, her face showing hardly a line of grief, where England’s whole visage is haggard from the struggle in which our men fought side by side for a common cause. Your soldiers came over to us, gorgeous youths as fresh as paint, tearing into the war like a football team into a game. And they went home, those that were left, trailing clouds of glory which we do not forget.
Something about those soldiers of yours, a suggestion of pure air, of wide horizons, of peace and a plenty which does not enervate, mingled with memories of a happy American visit some years before, made your shores seem to me the most desirable place in the world for spending a holiday. One of my sisters had gone, with her husband, to live in America, and although he was in the employ of an English firm (Price, Waterhouse and Company, accountants) my brother-in-law had conceived it to be only sportsmanlike to become a citizen and support the country from which he intended to draw sustenance and in which his children would be reared. Such thoroughgoing Americans have they become that we have resented not a little, on their rare visits to England, their attitude of the visitor rather than that of the native Briton. It was to their home in Cleveland that I was going for my vacation.
At first, considering it possible that I might like to live in America near my sister, I wrote to your consul in Manchester asking to be put on the quota. In the very civil letter I received from him I was informed that my name had been entered, but that, owing to the length of the list, it might be a year or possibly longer before I should be called.
As it was imperative that I take a vacation at once, I wrote immediately asking to be removed from the quota and put on the visitors’ list. The vice consul promptly replied that this had been done and I set blithely about unwinding the red tape which ties up foreign travel like yards of ribbon around a Christmas package.
On the twenty-sixth of October I set sail from Liverpool, and, although there were tears in my throat as I saw England fade away in the distance, my heart was high with expectation of the months that lay ahead.
The Cedric is a good boat. As I had heard much commendation of the new arrangements for inexpensive travel, I had taken passage tourist class. The service and cuisine were quite as good as I had been led to expect, and among my fellow travelers were many altogether delightful persons, some from the Continent, but for the most part British and Americans. Our crossing was pleasant but uneventful, and one sparkling afternoon we found ourselves coming into New York.
I was saying good-bye to some acquaintances — old friends, they seemed, after a week of such close companionship— when I heard a young girl say, close beside me, ‘Cette place jolie, qu’est-elle?’
It was seventeen-year-old Marie Joliet,1 who was coming to New York to work in her cousin’s dressmaking establishment. The woman she addressed, a big jolly American, understanding, but unequal to replying in French, replied, ‘Ellis Island. What do you think of it?’
Marie said that she thought it was lovely, and indeed so did I, as we looked at its clean-cut buildings, its trim gardens. There was something so fair-and-square-looking about its orderliness. I thought how like a fairy dream it must look to the povertycrushed immigrants who left their old lives behind and came here to build anew. I was leaning against the rail thinking of this when young Vincent lounged up and spoke to me.
‘ I say, Miss Miller,’ he said, ‘ did you know we’re coming in? Are you being met, by any chance?’
‘Not by any chance,’ I replied, ‘ but by my friends the Robinsons.’
‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘because you’ll need a bracer of some kind after the rigmarole of landing in this blessed country.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘What do you mean ? ’
‘You’ll see,’ he said, with an air of mock mystery, and lounged away.
The wharf was full of happy people waving, picking out their friends on deck. Passengers were eagerly scanning the crowd for their own dear ones. It had been several years since I had seen the Robinsons, but finally I saw Margery just as she saw me, and we took off the gardenias we had agreed to wear and waved them at each other. Ted called out to know if I could come off at once.
‘Oh,’ I called back, ‘they haven’t put us through inspection yet, but I suppose that, can’t take long.’
‘We’ll wait here,’ he called back, ‘and you come off as soon as you can.’
We were all told to go into the dining room and we went, merrily crowding against each other in our excitement and eagerness to reach our waiting friends, to get our land legs under us after the week at sea. We were laughing and talking when we were suddenly made aware of the presence among us of someone issuing orders.
‘Come along here and stop laughing,’ were his very gracious words. ‘If you don’t keep quiet I’ll keep you here all day. Take off your hats and gloves, stand close, and show your hands.’ He wore a black beard and I judged from his accent that he was of Russian extraction. He managed to put into his voice and manner so much that was threatening and disagreeable that I was reminded of the ogres in my childhood storybooks and I was glad when we had satisfied his demands and were herded into the lounge by our stewards, men who had been our servants on the voyage, become suddenly our unwilling guards.
In the lounge three immigration officials were seated at desks, and, having somewhat regained our spirits as soon as we left the tsar-person behind, we came into this room — some of us, at least — laughing and exchanging little jests. Again we were bidden in no gentle manner to keep still, not to laugh or speak, and to sit down. We were questioned then, one by one, each at one of the three desks. It was my lot to go before a big, dark, clean-shaven man, who was exceedingly disagreeable, to be sure, about the way he put the necessary questions, but who finally said, ‘That will do; you can go,’ and turned to his next victim.
With a sigh of relief I went to the door and handed my papers to the man who guarded it, one of our diningroom stewards. He looked through them and then said, ‘Where is your landing card, Miss Miller?’
‘Good heavens,’ I said, ‘isn’t it there?’
‘No, Miss Miller. He must have kept it. Did n’t he tell you he was keeping it?’
‘He said nothing about it. It must be a mistake.’
‘It would n’t be a mistake. He must have kept it. They’re devils to-day, anyhow. I’m sorry, Miss Miller, but you can’t land without it.’
‘But what shall I do?’ I asked. Others were coming up and I was conscious of blocking their way.
‘There is nothing to do,’ he said. ‘You had better go to your quarters and await instructions,’ and he turned to the next in line.
On my way to my room I met a White Star man, one of the ship’s officers, and appealed to him in my bewilderment.
‘Did they detain you? Oh, Miss Miller, I am sorry. And they did n’t even tell you why? I say, that’s rotten for you. I wish I might do something to help you, but I am utterly powerless here. We are in the hands of the United States Government, and what it does we must abide by. These officials are like wild men if you give them any — what is it they call it? — “back talk."'
‘But is there nothing you could do?’
‘I should n’t mind risking their fury for you if it would do any good, but it would n’t. It might even make things harder for you in the long run.’
‘But what am I to do? What will this delay mean?’
‘Ellis Island, I’m afraid.’
‘Ellis Island! But that’s absurd. They can’t send me to Ellis Island.’
‘Perhaps not. There may be some hitch which will be straightened out. I hope so, for your sake.’
II
I went to my cabin. A cheerless place it was, with carpet up and cleaning begun. I realized that I should feel still more forlorn should I be compelled to stay on the ship all night, for my luggage, including my attaché case which contained my toilet articles and nightgown, had gone ashore. Remembering my pleasant impression of Ellis Island as we came in, I was not at the moment so much concerned with the fear of going there as of having to go to bed without using my toothbrush. My steward tried to get my attaché case for me, but was unsuccessful.
It still seemed to me a joke, albeit an increasingly unpleasant one — my being held for no assigned reason outside the country I had come so far to visit and with such innocuous intent.
I was summoned to dinner in time and there found several other Britishers.
Miss Harrison, a naturalized American citizen who had been at home in England on a visit, was held because she could not produce her income-tax receipt for the previous year. She had explained to the officer that it had gone ashore in her trunk, as she had no idea she would need to show it, and he had refused her permission to have it fetched.
Mrs. Enzer, a Welsh woman in the middle fifties, was coming to spend six months with her husband in North Dakota. He had taken out his second papers as an American citizen, and as soon as Mrs. Enzer’s mother, back in Ilfracombe, should die she expected to come to America to stay. Meantime they managed an occasional visit when Mrs. Enzer’s sister could relieve her of her mother’s care. Mrs. Enzer had been warned that she might have some difficulty and had come armed with a five-hundred-dollar bond as surety, but this the immigration officer, for reasons he did not divulge, refused to accept.
One of the first-cabin passengers, a Mrs. Robertson2 from somewhere in Yorkshire, though she had been on the quota and had with her ample proof that she would not become a public charge, found herself no better off than the rest of us. She was coming to live with her sister and nephew, naturalized Americans, and pursuant to their warning she had brought several thousand dollars to ensure herself against detention at Ellis Island.
Then there was old Mr. Bird, and Vincent, who said he supposed he was held because he was broke. Vincent was an Irish mechanic who worked in Brooklyn. He had gone home to visit his mother, who had sickened while he was in England. The young chap had overstayed his time waiting for her to get better. She died instead, and, what with her funeral expenses and buying his ticket across, he had only a few dollars in his pockets when he arrived in New York and was forced to tell how much he had.
Such was the little group who ate dinner together and then gathered in the library to talk over our situation. The library steward came to me at six-thirty and said, ‘Miss Miller, your friends—they are still on the wharf, waiting.’
In my excitement I had forgotten all about them! ‘Could you get a note to them, do you think?’ I asked him.
He thought he could, so I scribbled that I was detained for some unknown reason and for them not to wait. I was told later that the steward slipped the note into my friend’s hand as he brushed by him and said, ‘Go outside to read this.’ Presently he came back with Ted Robinson’s card, on which Ted had written, ‘I’ll be back in the morning.’
We spent the evening as best we could without even the poor consolation of cigarettes or sweets, for the barber’s supplies were under lock and key. Vincent played and sang for us at intervals, for he was a versatile beggar and no poor wit, and bent on doing what he could to lighten the tedium for the rest of us. Despite all his efforts, however, we went rather drearily to bed about eleven o’clock.
Next morning — it was your election day —we were called to breakfast at seven-thirty and then advised that, as the lounge was locked, we should have to wait in the smoking room. There, accordingly, we did wait, and wonder, to the nerve-racking accompaniment of busy winches, what was to be our fate and why.
At lunch a steward came to say that Mr. Bird and Miss Harrison were wanted. Mr. Bird was presumably set free, for we saw him no more. Miss Harrison came back, almost in tears because of the insulting treatment she had received. She had somehow got her tax receipt and had it ready to show, but the officer before whom she passed refused to look at it. The man behind her in line, an American whom we had known on shipboard, leaned over her shoulder to protest.
‘You do not let Miss Harrison explain,’ he said. ‘She has her paper.’
‘What’s this man to you?’ demanded the officer, and turning to the man he said, ‘Why do you take such an interest in this young woman? You’ll find it pays to mind your own business.’ And with a few more meaningly pointed questions he sent her back to us prisoners, as we were beginning to call ourselves.
By lunch time we were feeling woebegone enough. Where were my friends, and to what inconvenience was my plight putting them? For I knew they would have been busy upon my behalf. What would my sister in Cleveland think at receiving no message from me when the boat landed? A thousand questions to which I found no answer added to my unrest. Only Vincent, of us Britishers, kept up a show of mirth, and all his jokes were tinged with sarcasm and had a tendency to be said from one corner of the mouth and directed at ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’
After lunch the library steward came to me and reported that Mr. Robinson had been on the wharf since eightthirty in the morning. I went up to one of the writers from the purser’s office and asked if he could get a note to my friend ashore. The lad replied that he thought he could, and when I handed it to him he went over to a sailor and asked him to carry it for me.
At that an immigration officer appeared from nowhere and execrated him roundly for trying to help a detained prisoner to communicate, and threatened to report him and make him lose his job. I took the note and held it open to the officer, saying, ’Please read this, and you will see that the boy was not assisting me in anything nefarious.’ No good. He not only refused to read the note, but repeated his threat of dishonoring the lad with his employers.
As soon as he had gone the sailor, who had a middle-aged, shrewd, kindly face, said to the boy, ‘Sonny, this means your job. You ’d better get to your boss right away and tell your story first.’ Then to me he said, ‘I think you can talk over the side to your friend if you go to the rail and beckon him to come in close.’
This I managed to do, and Ted shouted how sorry he was for whatever blunder caused me this mess, and that I must not worry. He was doing all he could and would eventually get me out, though I might have to go to Ellis Island before he could accomplish it.
Then I went to the purser’s office again and asked if there was any way in which I could send a wire. The writer said he thought not, but just at that moment a Western Union boy came along the deck with his hands full of telegraph blanks and I rushed up to him.
‘Could you send a message for me?’ I asked.
Yes, to be sure he could. To my sister in Cleveland? Yes. A message would cost perhaps seventy-five cents — he was n’t sure. Much relieved, I filled the blank, which would at least reassure Mab. Doubling the fee in order that the boy might be well repaid for befriending a lady in distress, I turned to the youth in the purser’s window for congratulations upon my coup.
To my disappointment he did not seem enthusiastic. ‘Did you give him money?’ he asked.
‘Yes. A dollar and a half. Why?’
‘I would n’t trust him if I were you.’
My sister never received the wire. Whether the Western Union boy was dishonest, or whether the message was stopped by your system of espionage, I do not know.
We learned that the officials had gone ashore at four o’clock, that it was election day in the States, and that this had something to do with the officers being so surly. They were impatient to get ashore to vote. (Americans always laugh when I tell this. They say that could hardly account for it — that no American takes his voting seriously enough to upset his equilibrium.) We further learned that thirty steerage passengers had been detained and that the people who had come to meet them had caused a near riot the day before, crying, ‘Give us our Maggie’; ‘I come to get Lizzie O’Malley and she’s comin’ off that boat or by Saint Patrick — ’ shaking their fists in the officers’ imperturbable faces.
About five o’clock a man came up to me and asked if I were Miss Miller and I confessed as much, although the air of mystery and ill omen about everything was beginning to get on my nerves and I did not like to admit anything to a stranger.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘Mr. Bartholomew telephoned me to see that you are all right.’
Wearily, I took it for what it was worth. Not very much to me, for I had never heard of a Mr. Bartholomew.
Dinner was a constrained meal, for the immigration officers were present. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
III
Wednesday morning we were given breakfast at seven, and at eight we were marshaled to the gangway and across the pier. We went through the customs and I was able to possess myself of my hand luggage. Then, in charge of two uniformed men, we were herded — cabin passengers, tourist class, and steerage — into a barnlike, miserably unventilated room with paper coming off the ceiling in strips, there to await the ferry for Ellis Island. It was then about eight-thirty and we were told that it might be twenty minutes until the ferry came.
The twenty minutes lengthened into an hour, an hour and a half. It was very hot in the room and the body smells of thirty steerage passengers, unwashed and excited, did not add to our comfort. I began to be dizzy and afraid I should faint, and I asked one of the guards if I might go outside. He said I might and grudgingly designated just where I might wait. I sat on a trunk and there a man came to me to say that Mr. Bartholomew sent word I was to be treated right, but that he was powerless to help me. I was by this time too tired to be mystified by the recurrence of the name of this unknown friend.
We waited three mortal hours for the ferryboat and when it came we were all but shoved aboard, bidden to sit down, and given apples to eat. Ellis Island lay waiting for us, very pretty in the sunlight with its good buildings and its gardens. Miss Harrison whispered to me that it did n’t look such a terrible place. She whispered unconsciously, I think, because of a feeling that the guard might have some objection to our little exchange of commonplace remarks.
We were marched, when we reached shore, into a big hall which seemed quite full of people all sitting disconsolately on benches, as if they were in some newfangled anteroom to Hell. They conversed in hushed voices. I felt sorriest for the children and the mothers with small babies. At four o’clock men came around with baskets of sandwiches and coffee in paper cups. The sandwiches were huge, coarse affairs. Miss Harrison, still at my side, whispered again, ‘I can’t eat this, Miss Miller, I simply can’t.’ ‘Eat it,’ I advised. ‘You can’t tell when we’ll have another chance at food of any kind.’ And I ate mine.
About fifteen minutes after that my name was called out: ‘Agnes Miller!’ and I was directed to go to the second of three desks at the end of the long room. There I was asked some routine questions — what was my profession, where I was trained, how long I intended to stay in America — and given a little ticket which I slipped into my glove, and a square of imprinted orange cardboard which had to be pinned to the lapel of my coat. From there I was sent through a sort of turnstile and upstairs into another huge hall.
This room was provided with benches and the walls were lined with shelves divided into cubicles, wherein we were bidden to put our luggage. The chamber was under the care and dominion of an enormous Negress called the matron. She advised Miss Harrison to put her things on a high shelf so that they might not get wet when the women scrubbed. From this we deduced that they would bo there all night. Among the strange faces in the room we saw one familiar to us, that of young Vincent, who beckoned us over to his bench and sat down facing us. ‘Siberia at last!’ he said, grimacing.
With Vincent was a youth named Fisher, who, like Vincent, had overstayed his time in England because of his mother’s death. He faced deportation, but, also like Vincent, put as bright a face on the situation as he could.
We sat and sat, discussing our plight in low tones, until, at five o’clock, a sort of tea was served in the dining room — coffee in cups without handles, thick bread, a kind of thick stew of meat and potatoes. We rallied each other into eating a little of this, and then we were marched back, under guard, to the hall, where we were locked in. There were so many of us by this time that only the women could sit. We were also given a glass of milk and a cracker each at seven o’clock, although the men got none. Then we were herded to bed — eight women to a room — and locked in. We were tired enough to drop and thankful to see that there were a toilet and a bowl for our use, and that on each bed there lay a little square of white cloth for a towel and a tiny cake of white soap.
Unfortunately there was a grating in the ceiling over our heads and someone peered through it every little while — an espionage perhaps necessary if we had been disposed to plot or throw bombs, but not conducive to the comfort of eight weary travelers who by this time asked only the boon of sleep. There were crumbs and hairs in the beds, mute witnesses that others had gone before us there, so we did not undress, but wrapped ourselves in our coats and lay on top of the cots. So exhausted were we that we fell asleep almost instantly, only to be wakened at nine o’clock by a banging open of the door and a raucous voice booming: —
‘Everybody here well? Anybody want to see the doctor? Anyone want to see the doctor?’
The gracious individual who thus woke us from our first sleep (it might mercifully have lasted all night but for him) then banged the door to and locked it with a key that grated.
Whether it was he or some other who sat guard by the door all night and blew his nose every few minutes I cannot tell you.
At five-thirty next morning we were ordered to get up, dress, and sit on the benches outside our cubicle, after which we were bidden to follow a guard who led us back to the hall with which we had become familiar the day before. There we met our friend Vincent and learned that he had fared worse than we, because the men had bunks in one big hall where he slept with a Negro above and another below him, with almost every nationality under the sun in the shelves about. At seven o’clock we were called into the dining room and given a plate of scrambled egg, a cup of coffee, and a pear.
There were, we learned, twenty-two cabin passengers detained from the Celia, and as discomfort, like prosperity, makes friends, we fell to chatting with these strangers and heard from them some of their own dilemmas and the story of several notable cases on the Island.
Such was the case of Annie Sweeny, an Irish peasant girl who had come over to America to go into domestic service. Her roommate had developed diphtheria on the voyage and Annie was held in quarantine for two weeks thereafter, at the end of which time she was not only subjected to the usual tests for infection, but was compelled to strip and go before a roomful of doctors, old and young. Wounded in the most sensitive part of her peasant’s soul, her sense of respectability, she had refused to pass through this ordeal a second time and had up to date been held nine weeks.
There was a pitifully clumsy man who had two small children to care for. The mother had been taken to the hospital upon arrival in port, and he had not been able to learn the nature of her illness, nor was he allowed to visit her. ‘It looks to me,’ he said, with an attempt at a smile, ‘as if I were doomed to bring these children up on this island.’ The little girl’s dress was buttoned amiss and every time he tried to right the matter he made a different mistake. The boy, about three, was a ravenous little beast and not content with the breakfast served, so that the father gave him most of his own food.
At eight o’clock we were marched out under guard to take air in the gardens. Not only were we escorted, but there were guards in uniform stationed all about the place. Such a dejected lot were we that I suddenly thought what a life the guards’ must be and I asked one of them, who had a human sort of face, ‘Do you live here?’
He shook his head and replied, ‘Thank heaven, no. Don’t wish such a fate as that on me. No one lives here, really. We work in shifts and all go ashore when we’re through.'
At ten o’clock — by that time we were again in the big hall — my name was called from the platform and I was preceded down a long corridor by a guard and shown into a small room resembling an English courtroom. The judge’s place was occupied by a big bulldog-like man of about thirty, a bobbed and marcelled young woman who appeared to be his stenographer, and an elderly person who turned out to be an interpreter.
The man was smoking a big cigar, which he did not remove while he put questions to the young French girl, Marie Joliet, who had been on the Cedric with us. Marie looked frightfully pale, with blue circles about her eyes, and her slender little figure drooped with dejection. The man, whom the interpreter addressed as Mr. Ryan, put questions through the interpreter, and Marie, her voice so low that I could not catch her words, replied. She was crying, and that seemed somehow hugely to amuse Mr. Ryan. He turned to the stenographer at one point and said, ‘She says she’s the man’s’ — here he put his hand before his face and spoke a word I did not catch, finishing with a great laugh.
The stenographer pursed up her painted lips at him and stuck out her tongue. ‘She did not. She said she was his cousin.’
Ryan leaned back in his chair and guffawed, looking at the stenographer. ‘I’ll bet you a box of candy she said what I said.’
‘I’ll bet you. Have him put the question again.’
The question was put.
‘There!’ cried the stenographer with a delighted shriek. ‘I get my box of candy! ’
Finally they had finished with Marie and let her go. Next came an Irish boy who had been sitting beside me. He had rather a lame story, poor lad, about his visa being blown overboard when he was showing it to someone, and he was, I understood later, deported.
‘Agnes Miller!' I was beginning to hate the sound of my name. I went and took my turn where Marie Joliet and the Irish boy had stood.
I was asked how much money I had, whether I had it on me, and who my banker was. Also where I took my nurse’s training. The answer, ‘Manchester,’ satisfied, although there are so many hospitals in Manchester that even the astute Mr. Ryan could have learned nothing from that reply.
Finally he deigned to say, ‘Well, you’ll have to stay here until your sister comes from Cleveland and puts up bond for you.’
’But,’I said, ‘if you ’ll only wire her, my brother-in-law will be glad to put up bond.’
‘That won’t do. Go back to the bench and sit down.’
I was desperate and took a chance. Surely the Robinsons were here on the Island by this time. ‘But,’ I said, ‘there is someone here who will put up bond for me, if you will only call him.’
He beckoned to one of the attendants by the door and gave him an order. The attendant went out and presently returned with the Robinsons and a man I later learned to be Mr. Wilson from the firm of Price, Waterhouse and Company. They were not allowed to speak to me, nor I to them, but Margery signaled to me as best she could, while the men were in conference with Mr. Ryan, that all would be well. It seems that Ted Robinson’s bond, offered the first day, was not acceptable because he was an Englishman. Another friend, Mr. Houston, was refused for the same reason. Mr. Wilson’s bond was satisfactory.
Though I was a little reassured by Margery’s signal, it was with a sinking heart that I saw my friends leave that little chamber, and I sat for another three-quarters of an hour on my bench with no more intimation of what was to be done with me. At the end of that time I was sent into another room, where a man who spoke a most broken English (indeed the crevasses in it were such that I could barely understand his meaning and I have n’t a remote idea from what race he derived) deprived me of my orange ticket and gave me a green one.
Lunch was served in the dining room, and after that all the detainees except Mr. Fisher and me were called back — to the courtrooms, I suppose. Mr. Fisher had not yet been heard. We waited and waited, and finally I asked a charwoman who was busy about the benches what I was supposed to do now. She said, ‘ You ’ll have to ask the matron, miss.’
I looked at the noncommittal visage of the colored matron and decided to wait without asking.
At about two o’clock an officer appeared with a telegram in his hand and called out my name. When I answered he told me to get my luggage and follow him. This I did and found myself back again in Ryan’s audience room, and lo, there were Mrs. Enzer and the unlucky Vincent, jingling his insufficient coins in his pocket and making a wry face over the situation, but still with a ready joke on his Irish tongue.
Mr. Ryan looked up and saw me, then crooked a finger at one of the wardens by the door. The man bent over his superior’s desk and received an order, then came to me and told me that if I would follow him he would lead me to my friends. I bade my fellow prisoners good-bye and better luck and followed my guide outside, where Margery, Ted, and Mr. Wilson received me with open arms. It transpired that Mr. Bartholomew was the commissary for the White Star Line, a client of Price, Waterhouse and Company.
Thus, after a penal servitude the cause of which no inquiries have been able to elicit, I was made free of America for the four months I had so innocently planned to enjoy.
Do you wonder that the keen edge of my pleasure in coming was rather sadly dulled; that the nerves I had come over to rest were so much worse that I involuntarily dodged behind Ted Robinson at sight of a man in khaki, saying, ‘Don’t let him get me!’ like a frightened child?
I had a charming time in your country and met many charming people, but not even their kindness can ever quite obliterate the impression of your national hospitality gained while I sojourned, a guest, on your beautiful Ellis Island.