There were twelve in all in the party, five adults and six children—­and Ona, who was a little of both.  They had a hard time on the passage; there was an agent who helped them, but he proved a scoundrel, and got them into a trap with some officials, and cost them a good deal of their precious money, which they clung to with such horrible fear.  This happened to them again in New York—­for, of course, they knew nothing about the country, and had no one to tell them, and it was easy for a man in a blue uniform to lead them away, and to take them to a hotel and keep them there, and make them pay enormous charges to get away.  The law says that the rate card shall be on the door of a hotel, but it does not say that it shall be in Lithuanian.

It was in the stockyards that Jonas’ friend had gotten rich, and so to Chicago the party was bound.  They knew that one word, Chicago and that was all they needed to know, at least, until they reached the city.  Then, tumbled out of the cars without ceremony, they were no better off than before; they stood staring down the vista of Dearborn Street, with its big black buildings towering in the distance, unable to realize that they had arrived, and why, when they said “Chicago,” people no longer pointed in some direction, but instead looked perplexed, or laughed, or went on without paying any attention.  They were pitiable in their helplessness; above all things they stood in deadly terror of any sort of person in official uniform, and so whenever they saw a policeman they would cross the street and hurry by.  For the whole of the first day they wandered about in the midst of deafening confusion, utterly lost; and it was only at night that, cowering in the doorway of a house, they were finally discovered and taken by a policeman to the station.  In the morning an interpreter was found, and they were taken and put upon a car, and taught a new word—­“stockyards.”  Their delight at discovering that they were to get out of this adventure without losing another share of their possessions it would not be possible to describe.

They sat and stared out of the window.  They were on a street which seemed to run on forever, mile after mile—­thirty-four of them, if they had known it—­and each side of it one uninterrupted row of wretched little two-story frame buildings.  Down every side street they could see, it was the same—­never a hill and never a hollow, but always the same endless vista of ugly and dirty little wooden buildings.  Here and there would be a bridge crossing a filthy creek, with hard-baked mud shores and dingy sheds and docks along it; here and there would be a railroad crossing, with a tangle of switches, and locomotives puffing, and rattling freight cars filing by; here and there would be a great factory, a dingy building with innumerable windows in it, and immense volumes of smoke pouring from the chimneys, darkening the air above and making filthy the earth beneath.  But after each of these interruptions, the desolate procession would begin again—­the procession of dreary little buildings.