Soon after this Michael was sent to a higher school in the town of Panchevo, about fifteen miles from Idvor. Here he studied hard to catch up with the boys and girls whose privileges had been so much greater than his own. He did so well at Panchevo that at the end of the year the congregation of the village church at Idvor gave money to his parents that he might be sent to continue his schooling at Prague. When the day came for him to take the long journey to Prague, his mother had everything ready for him. There were two bags made of beautifully coloured wool, which contained all his belongings; one his clothes and the other his provisions, which consisted of a large loaf of bread and a roast goose. He had only the suit that he was wearing, but his sisters told him it was stylish and that he looked like a city-bred boy. He had a long yellow overcoat made of sheepskins and a black sheepskin cap. The journey was by boat to Budapest and thence by rail to Prague. Michael had never seen either a steamboat or a railway train before, and he opened his eyes wide with wonder. On the boat he fell in with a group of young students who professed to take great interest in him, but after they had gone he discovered that they had taken his roast goose, and he had to content himself with his loaf of bread. Once settled in Prague he made good progress at the school, and no doubt would have remained there for several years had not his father died, and the boy was stranded. Some time before this he had heard that America was a land of great opportunity for such lads as he, and he determined to go there. He sold his watch, his books, his clothes, even his yellow sheepskin coat and his black sheepskin cap, in order to raise the passage money. He thought he would not need much clothing in America, for he had seen pictures of almost naked Indians; so he concluded that it must be a warm climate, and very little clothing would be needed. On the 12th of March, 1874, when only a few months past his fifteenth birthday, he set sail on the _Westphalia_ for New York. The journey across the Atlantic was not a very pleasant one for the young Serbian. The weather was bitterly cold and stormy. He was so thinly clad that he spent the chilly March nights huddled close to the smokestack of the vessel in order to keep warm. He did not have sufficient money to rent a mattress or a blanket for his bunk. It was a severe test for the lonely lad and many a night, as he hugged the smokestack of the vessel and shifted his position to avoid the force of the gale and the sharpness of its icy blasts, his courage almost failed him. The only headgear he had was a Turkish fez and most of the other immigrants thought that he was a Turk and left him severely alone. When, at the end of the fourteen days, land was seen nobody on the ship was happier than he.