and full of noise and smoke and gloom, and clang of iron, the place was, but some one had told him it was called Berlin.  Then they rang a bell, and another steam-machine came in, and again he was taken on and on through a land that wearied his eyes by its flatness without a single bit of a hill to be seen anywhere.  One more night he spent shut up in a building like a good stable with a litter of straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst a lot of men, of whom not one could understand a single word he said.  In the morning they were all led down to the stony shores of an extremely broad muddy river, flowing not between hills but between houses that seemed immense.  There was a steam-machine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it packed tight, only now there were with them many women and children who made much noise.  A cold rain fell, the wind blew in his face; he was wet through, and his teeth chattered.  He and the young man from the same valley took each other by the hand.

“They thought they were being taken to America straight away, but suddenly the steam-machine bumped against the side of a thing like a house on the water.  The walls were smooth and black, and there uprose, growing from the roof as it were, bare trees in the shape of crosses, extremely high.  That’s how it appeared to him then, for he had never seen a ship before.  This was the ship that was going to swim all the way to America.  Voices shouted, everything swayed; there was a ladder dipping up and down.  He went up on his hands and knees in mortal fear of falling into the water below, which made a great splashing.  He got separated from his companion, and when he descended into the bottom of that ship his heart seemed to melt suddenly within him.

“It was then also, as he told me, that he lost contact for good and all with one of those three men who the summer before had been going about through all the little towns in the foothills of his country.  They would arrive on market days driving in a peasant’s cart, and would set up an office in an inn or some other Jew’s house.  There were three of them, of whom one with a long beard looked venerable; and they had red cloth collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government officials.  They sat proudly behind a long table; and in the next room, so that the common people shouldn’t hear, they kept a cunning telegraph machine, through which they could talk to the Emperor of America.  The fathers hung about the door, but the young men of the mountains would crowd up to the table asking many questions, for there was work to be got all the year round at three dollars a day in America, and no military service to do.