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 main force, but the journey this time was short, and in half an hour he found himself upon an embankment where hundreds of Italians were laboring with pick and shovel in the broiling sun.  Here he also was given a pick and told to go to work.

Toni soon became accustomed to his new surroundings.  Every night he and the rest were carried to Lambertville on flat cars and in the mornings were brought back to the embankment.  The work was no harder than that to which he had been used, and he soon became himself again.  Moreover, he found many of his old friends from Culiano working there.  In the evenings they walked through the streets of the town or sat under the trees playing mora and tocco.  His letters home were quite enthusiastic regarding the pleasant character of the life.  To be sure he could not write himself, but his old friend Antonio Strollo, who had lived at Valva, only a mile from Culiano, acted as his amanuensis.  He was very