Inventors -- United States -- Biography; Pupin, Michael, 1858-1935
nevertheless, I felt quite brave and strong in the daytime; at night,
however, when, standing alone alongside of the smoke-stack, I beheld
through the howling darkness the white rims of the mountain-high waves
speeding on like maddened dragons toward the tumbling ship, my heart
sank low. It was my implicit trust in God and in his regard for my
mother’s prayers which enabled me to overcome my fear and bravely face
the horrors of the angry seas.
* * * * *
On the fourteenth day, early in the morning, the flat coast-line of
Long Island hove in sight. Nobody in the motley crowd of excited
immigrants was more happy to see the promised land than I was. It was
a clear, mild, and sunny March morning, and as we approached New York
Harbor the warm sun-rays seemed to thaw out the chilliness which I had
accumulated in my body by continuous exposure to the wintry blasts
of the North Atlantic. I felt like a new person, and saw in every
new scene presented by the New World as the ship moved into it a new
promise that I should be welcome. Life and activity kept blossoming
out all along the ship’s course, and seemed to reach full bloom as we
entered New York Harbor. The scene which was then unfolded before my
eyes was most novel and bewildering. The first impressions of Budapest
and of Prague seemed like pale-faced images of the grand realities
which New York Harbor disclosed before my eager eyes. A countless
multitude of boats lined each shore of the vast river; all kinds of
craft ploughed hurriedly in every direction through the waters of the
bay; great masses of people crowded the numerous ferry-boats, and gave
me the impression that one crowd was just about as anxious to reach
one shore of the huge metropolis as the other was to reach the other
shore; they all must have had some important thing to do, I thought.
The city on each side of the shore seemed to throb with activity. I did
not distinguish between New York and Jersey City. Hundreds of other
spots like the one I beheld, I thought, must be scattered over the vast
territories of the United States, and in these seething pots of human
action there must be some one activity, I was certain, which needed me.
This gave me courage. The talk which I had listened to during two weeks
on the immigrant ship was rather discouraging, I thought. One immigrant
was bragging about his long experience as a cabinetmaker, and informed
his audience that cabinetmakers were in great demand in America;
another one was telling long tales about his skill as a mechanician; a
third one was spinning out long yarns about the fabulous agricultural
successes of his relatives out West, who had invited him to come there
and join them; a fourth confided to the gaping crowd that his brother,
who was anxiously waiting for him, had a most prosperous bank in some
rich mining-camp in Nevada where people never saw any money except
silver and gold and hardly ever a coin smaller than a dollar; a fifth
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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