At first the train rolled for some time through a dark tunnel under the city, then through an open cut between high walls of masonry, and finally it burst into a wide, free landscape.  So this was America’s real face.  Only now, after the noises of the Witches’ Sabbath, the turmoil of the great invasion, had somewhat subsided, Frederick breathed the true breath of the virgin country’s soil.

Observing that all the passengers in the coach stuck their tickets in their hat bands, Frederick did the same, and then turned his eyes on the fields and hills clothed in their white winter garments.  To the young man, uprooted from his native soil, there was a happy, stimulating mystery in this landscape, which in the light of the winter sun so closely resembled his birthplace.  The alien surroundings all spoke to him of his home.  He could have jumped from the car and taken the snow in his hands, not only to look upon it, but to feel that it was the very same snow which as a schoolboy he had rolled into balls for bombarding his playmates.  He felt as a spoiled child feels which is torn from its mother’s arms and thrown upon a heartless world of strangers and, after a long period of anguish, unexpectedly meets a sister of his mother in a dreary country far, far from home.  He feels the blood-tie, he feels how like he is to her and she to him, how surprisingly, how delightfully she resembles his mother, feature by feature.

At last, it seemed to Frederick, the great Atlantic Ocean was really behind him.  Though he had landed in New York, he felt that until now he had not planted his feet firmly on the ground.  Great well-established mother earth, the breadth and extent of her solidity, which he beheld again after so long a separation, at last set bounds in his soul to the fearful expanse and might of the ocean.  Mother earth was a good and great giantess who had cunningly snatched the lives of her children from the giantess ocean and had put everything on a firm, everlasting basis with a hedge of safety all around.

“Forget the tumbling waters, forget the ocean, strike root into the soil,” a voice within Frederick spoke; and while the train rolled smoothly and faster and further inland, he had a sense of being on a blissful flight.

Frederick was so lost in meditation that he started when someone without saying a word took the ticket from his hatband.  It was a cultivated-looking man in a simple uniform, the conductor, who punched the card, said not a word, moved not a muscle of his face, and travelled from seat to seat, performing the same operation and always returning the punched tickets to the men’s hats, which they kept on their heads.  Nobody paid the least attention to him.  Frederick smiled when he thought of Germany, where every train was received with the clanging of a bell and set in motion with three soundings of a gong, amid the general uproar of the officials, who bellowed like a horde of Apaches; and where the conductors demanded the tickets from the passengers with much rough, awkward ceremony.