“Can we go on?” asked Hamilton.  “I would like to see just how this works!”

“All right,” responded his guide, smiling at the boy’s eagerness, “go ahead.”

As they reached the next room, Hamilton saw the clerk ushering the seven immigrants behind a grating.  Outside the grate was a narrow open space and then a desk.  On the farther side of the desk the friends of the seven in question were waiting.  There was one lad, just about his own age, among the friends, and Hamilton waited curiously to see whom he was to meet.  Among the immigrants was a sweet-faced old Frenchwoman, and Hamilton hoped that she might be the lad’s relative.  As it chanced, this boy was the first to come up.

[Illustration:  IMMIGRATION STATION, ELLIS ISLAND.  The greatest center of racial activity in the world, where a million aliens yearly pass through to American citizenship. (Courtesy of U.S.  Immigration Station, Ellis Island.)]

“For whom are you calling?” he was asked.

The young lad answered clearly and promptly, and the clerk nodded approvingly as the questions proceeded.

“You say you have an older brother,” the clerk said, “and the two of you are able to keep your grandmother?”

“Yes, indeed, sir,” was the reply.

“You are young to have come.  Why didn’t your brother come instead?”

“He has been a waiter in a French hotel,” answered the boy, “and has not learned much English He asked me to come.”

A few short, sharp queries established the relationship without question and the boy was released from the desk.  The door in the grating was opened, and to Hamilton’s delight it was the old Frenchwoman who came out.  After a most affectionate greeting, they went off together, the boy coming back to thank the clerk profusely, with true French courtesy.

“I suppose all that is necessary,” said Hamilton “but I’ll admit I don’t see why.  No one would be likely to call for some one else’s grandmother!”

“We want to be sure that women who land here are really with their own people,” said the official, evading a more direct statement, “and sometimes if the chief of the ‘temporary detention’ work is not satisfied, the immigrant is sent back to ‘special inquiry.’”

“How long are they detained?”

“Nearly all go out the same day.  A few, however, have to telegraph for their friends to meet them, and we look after that on their behalf.  They are never temporarily detained over five days, except in the case where a child has been held in quarantine and some member of the family has to remain until the patient is released in order to take charge of him.  That covers, you see, all those who come here except the ’special inquiry’ cases.”

“May I see those?” asked Hamilton.