“Suppose you come along with me, then,” said his new acquaintance, who was none other than the Chief of the Information Division, “and I’ll show you round myself as far as I can spare the time.  It so happens that there are a lot of scattering things I want to look after through the building to-day, and if you don’t mind my leaving you alone, once in a while, I’ll take you through systematically.  Where do you want to begin?”

“Right at the very start,” rejoined Hamilton “I always think the beginning is the most important part, and I’d hate to lose any of it.”

“All right,” said his conductor good-humoredly; “if you want it all, you shall have it.  I notice, too,” he said, as they walked along the hall and out of the door to the well-kept lawns that stretch between the main building and the sea wall, “that you’re in good time, for there’s a barge just pulling in.”

“The barge is from one of the liners that came in this morning, I suppose?” queried the lad.

“Yes, one of the Hamburg boats,” his guide replied.

“Are those barges run by the immigration authorities?”

“No,” was the answer, “those are owned or managed by the steamboat companies.  They bring all the steerage passengers who can’t show that they are citizens, and all the cabin passengers who are being detained.”

“Cabin passengers,” echoed Hamilton in surprise; “I didn’t think any cabin passengers came to Ellis Island.  All second cabin, I suppose?”

“Not a bit of it,” answered the immigration official; “there’s quite a sprinkling of first-class passengers as well.  Why, during a period of three months recently, nearly three thousand cabin passengers were detained on the island here, and I suppose twenty per cent of them had come over in the first-class saloon.”

“But why should any first-class passengers be stopped and shipped to Ellis Island?” queried the boy.  “I don’t understand.  I thought Ellis Island was to keep out people who were paupers, or diseased, or were undesirable citizens!”

[Illustration:  THE BIGGEST LINER IN THE WORLD COMING IN.  Ocean steamship with thousands of immigrants on board entering New York harbor; the Statue of Liberty in the distance. (Brown Bros.)]

“That’s just exactly what it is for,” the other replied, “but the United States government doesn’t think that having money enough to pay for a first-class passage makes every man a desirable citizen!  A first-class berth is no insurance against an incurable disease, for example, and there’s nothing to prevent a criminal from coming over in the first cabin.”  He laughed.  “Most of them do, I think,” he said.

“It really never appealed to me just that way,” the boy remarked; “I supposed always that first-class passengers went right through if they passed quarantine.”