HUNTING FOR LOST CHILDREN
The loss of our baggage was only the beginning of our troubles in New York. With the feather ticks went also the money mother had got from selling the bedsteads and other furniture. She had nothing with which to buy food and while we were walking the streets we smelt the delicious odor of food from the restaurants and became whining and petulant. This was the first time mother had ever heard her children crying for bread when she had none to give them. The experience was trying, but her stout heart faced it calmly. In the Old World, her folks and father's folks had been rated as prosperous people. They always had good food in the larder and meat on Sunday, which was more than many had. They were the owners of feather beds, while many never slept on anything but straw. True they could not raise the passage money to America until father came and earned it--that would have been riches in Wales. Now we were in America hungry and penniless, and hard was the bed that we should lie on.
From Pittsburgh father had sent us railroad tickets, and these tickets were waiting for us at the railroad office. All we would have to do would be to hold our hunger in check until we should reach Hubbard, Ohio, where a kinsman had established a home. But while mother was piloting her family to the depot, two of the children got lost. She had reached Castle Garden with six children and her household goods. Now her goods were gone and only four of the children remained. My sister was ten and I was eight; we were the oldest. The baby, one year old, and the next, a toddler of three, mother had carried in her arms. But two boys, Walter and David, four and six years old, had got lost in the traffic. Mother took the rest of us to a hotel and locked us in a room while she went out to search for the missing ones. For two days she tramped the streets visiting police stations and making inquiry everywhere. At night she would return to us and report that she had found no trace of little Walter and David. To try to picture the misery of those scenes is beyond me. I can only say that the experience instilled in me a lasting terror. The fear of being parted from my parents and from my brothers and sisters, then implanted in my soul, has borne its fruit in after-life.
Finally mother found the boys in a rescue home for lost children. Brother David, curly-haired and red-cheeked, had so appealed to the policeman who found them that he had made application to adopt the boy and was about to take him to his own home.
After finding the children, mother stood on Broadway and, gazing at the fine buildings and the good clothes that all classes wore in America, she felt her heart swell with hope. And she said aloud: "This is the place for my boys."Every one had treated her with kindness. A fellow countryman had lent her money to pay the hotel bill, telling her she could pay it back after she had joined her husband. And so we had passed through the gateway of the New World as thousands of other poor families had done. And our temporary hardships had been no greater than most immigrants encountered in those days.
I later learned from a Bohemian of the trials his mother met with on her first days in New York. He told me that she and her three children, the smallest a babe in arms, tramped the streets of New York for days looking in vain for some one who could speak their native tongue. They slept at night in doorways, and by day wandered timid and terrified through the streets.
