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This was no green Ireland with enormous skyscapes of fairyland and the fresh fragrance of grass and trees and the still metallic glitter of blue lakes and snug thatched roofs and gardens knee-deep in bright bloom and racing streams filled with fish and herons, and songs of larks and hedgerows shining with buttercups and the pungent smell of burning peat and warm little fires and laughter in the pubs and the gay lilt of fiddlers. Here were no mysterious lanes overhung with oaks and hollyhocks, no welcome cries, no songs, no smiling lips. Joseph, still peering out at New York, saw the coming to life of factories and their heavy black tides of smoke darkening a sky already torn with storm. A mist was beginning to rise from the water and soon there would be fog as well as rain and snow. Joseph could hear the winter wind, and the ship rocked against the wharf. The boy's mouth opened in soundless pain and misery, but he immediately quelled the shameful emotion. He had terrible news for his father, and now he thought of Daniel as a child who must be protected. There were hurrying loud footsteps on the decks above, and calls, and Joseph knew that the fortunate passengers were disembarking and their trunks and boxes with them. By straining he could see the first passengers leaving, the women in furs, the men in thick greatcoats and tall beaver hats. Carriages were appearing on the wharfs, with coachmen. The wind whipped coats and the men, laughing, held their hats to their heads and helped their ladies against the blast and to the carriages. The horses' sleek bodies smoked. The water smoked. The sky appeared to smoke. And the morning steadily darkened. Luggage was taken ashore, and waiting crowds embraced the passengers, and even from the closed steerage Joseph could hear laughter and excited twitterings, and could see the happy movements of snugly clad bodies. The crowd waiting for steerage passengers had retreated like a frightened band of cattle, and huddled together to let the fortunate pass to their carriages, followed by carts of leather luggage and trunks banded in iron and brass. These were not those whom the Queen called "the Irish peasantry," but were landed gentry or Americans returning from sojourns abroad. Joseph watched them enter their closed carriages, laughing at the wind, the ladies' bonnets whirling with ribbons, their skirts ballooning. The carriages rumbled away at last, and now there was only the wretched crowd who would not be permitted to enter the ship nor even to see their relatives in the steerage, for fear of contagion. Nor were steerage passengers, not even during the long voyage, ever permitted to climb to the upper decks for air and sunshine. For the first time in his life Joseph felt the awful sickness of humiliation. True, in Ireland, the Irish were despised and reviled and persecuted by the Sassenagh, but then one in turn stoutly despised and reviled the Sassenagh, himself. No Irishman ever felt inferior even to his "betters," or to the English. He walked and lived proudly, even when starving. He never raised a piteous cry for succor and sympathy. He was a man. But Joseph now guessed that in America the Irishman was not a man. Here he would be permitted no pride in his race and in his Faith. He would meet only with indifference or contempt or rejection, less than the cattle which were now clambering down the oily wet gangplank, accompanied by amorphous figures huddled against cold and storm. How Joseph guessed the truth he never fully understood, except that he suddenly remembered that though his father had written joyously of warmth and "good wages" he had not written of the people among whom he had found himself but only of brother Irishmen who had fled the Famine. There had never been any mention of Americans nor gossip of neighbors nor bits of news concerning fellow workers. There had been one remark about the "little church" near the rooming house where Daniel worked as a janitor, and where he