Comes the last day.  Dead ahead lies a misty, thread-like strip of dark blue, snuggling down against the horizon, where sea and sky merge.

You think it is a cloud bank, until somebody tells you the glorious truth.  It is the Western Hemisphere—­your Western Hemisphere.  It is New England.  Dear old New England!  Charming people—­the New Englanders!  Ah, breathes there the man with soul so dead who never to himself has said, this is my own, my native land?  Certainly not.  A man with a soul so dead as that would be taking part in a funeral, not in a sea voyage.  Upon your lips a word hangs poised.  What a precious sound it has, what new meanings it has acquired!  There are words in our language which are singular and yet sound plural, such as politics and whereabouts; there are words which are plural and yet sound singular, such as Brigham Young, and there are words which convey their exact significance by their very sound.  They need no word-chandlers, no adjective-smiths to dress them up in the fine feathers of fancy phrasing.  They stand on their own merits.  You think of one such word—­a short, sweet word of but four letters.  You speak that word reverently, lovingly, caressingly.

Nearer and nearer draws that blessed dark blue strip.  Nantucket light is behind us.  Long Island shoulders up alongside.  Trunks accumulate in gangways; so do stewards and other functionaries.  You have been figuring upon the tips which you will bestow upon them at parting; so have they.  It will be hours yet before we land.  Indeed, if the fog thickens, we may not get in before to-morrow, yet people run about exchanging good-byes and swapping visiting cards and promising one another they will meet again.  I think it is reckless for people to trifle with their luck that way.

Forward, on the lower deck, the immigrants cluster, chattering a magpie chorus in many tongues.  The four-and-twenty blackbirds which were baked in a pie without impairment to the vocal cords have nothing on them.  Most of the women were crying when they came aboard at Naples or Palermo or Gibraltar.  Now they are all smiling.  Their dunnage is piled in heaps and sailors, busy with ropes and chains and things, stumble over it and swear big round German oaths.

Why, gracious!  We are actually off Sandy Hook.  Dear old Sandy —­how one loves those homely Scotch names!  The Narrows are nigh and Brooklyn, the City Beautiful, awaits us around the second turning to the left.  The pilot boat approaches.  Brave little craft!  Gallant pilot!  Do you suppose by any chance he has brought any daily papers with him?  He has—­hurrah for the thoughtful pilot!  Did you notice how much he looked like the pictures of Santa Claus?

We move on more slowly and twice again we stop briefly.  The quarantine officers have clambered up the sides and are among us; and to some of us they give cunning little thermometers to hold in our mouths and suck on, and of others they ask chatty, intimate questions with a view to finding out how much insanity there is in the family at present and just what percentage of idiocy prevails?  Three cheers for the jolly old quarantine regulations.  Even the advance guard of the customhouse is welcomed by one and all—­or nearly all.