"The courtyard was my sky-roofed chamber of dreams," she said. "Slowly strolling past the endless pillars of the colonnade, the fountain murmured in my ear of all the beautiful things in all the beautiful world. Here I liked to remind myself of Polotzk, the better to bring out the wonder of my life. That I who was brought up to my teens almost without a book should be set down in the midst of all the books that ever were written was a miracle as great as any on record. That an outcast should become a privileged citizen, that a beggar should dwell in a palace--this was a romance more thrilling than poet ever sung. Surely I was rocked in an enchanted cradle." As Mary Antin's afternoons were made glorious by these visits to the public library, so her nights were lightened by rare half-hours on the South Boston Bridge where it crosses the Old Colony Railroad. As she looked down at the maze of tracks and the winking red and green signal lights, her soul leaped at the thought of the complex world in which she lived and the wonderful way in which it was ordered and controlled by the mind of man. Years afterward in telling about her dreams on the bridge she said: "Then the blackness below me was split by the fiery eye of a monster engine, his breath enveloped me in blinding clouds, his long body shot by, rattling a hundred claws of steel, and he was gone. So would I be, swift on my rightful business, picking out my proper track from the million that cross it, pausing for no obstacles, sure of my goal." Can you imagine how the child from Polotzk loved the land that had taken her to itself? As she stood up in school with the other children and saluted the Stars and Stripes, the words she said seemed to come from the depths of her soul: "I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands--one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Those were not words, they were heart throbs. The red of the flag was not just a bright color, it was the courage of heroes; the white was the symbol of truth clear as the sunlight; the blue was the symbol of the wide, free heavens--her spirit's fatherland. The child who had been born in prison, who had repeated at every Passover, "Next year, may we be in Jerusalem," had found all at once her true country, her flag, and her heroes. When the children rose to sing "America," she sang with all the pent-up feeling of starved years of exile: I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills. As the teacher looked into the glorified face of this little alien-citizen she said to herself, "There is the truest patriot of them all!" Only once as they were singing "Land where my fathers died," the child's voice had faltered and died away. Her cheek paled when at the close of school she came to her teacher with her trouble. "Oh, teacher," she mourned, "our country's song can't to mean me--_my_ fathers didn't die here!"