And in the fall I went back--this time a week _before_ college opened--and was met by Harvey at the station, just as those rural-looking boys had been met by their friends the year before. When I reached the campus, I was surprised to see how many people knew me. Scores of them came up and slapped me on the back and shook hands in their hearty, boisterous fashion, and hoped that I had had a jolly summer. I was asked to join boarding-clubs, to become a member in debating societies, to come and see this fellow or that in his room. It took me off my feet, this sudden geniality of my fellows toward me. I had not been aware how, throughout the previous year, the barriers between us had been gradually and steadily breaking down. It came upon me all at once. I felt my heart going out to my new friends. I had become one of them. I was not a man without a country. I was an American. ELIZABETH G. STERN The pathos of the readjustment of the foreign-born to the new life in America has nowhere been more touchingly presented than in the story, “My Mother and I,” by Mrs. E. G. Stern, who was born in Russian Poland. Anyone who has gone on a long journey to make his home far from friends and relatives knows something of the pain of separating from loved ones; but the pain of such a separation cannot compare with the travail of taking a far spiritual journey. That one may still have deep reverence for the past, though breaking away from it, is the conviction of the author, who says: “And I shall always remember that, though my life is now part of my land’s, yet, if I am truly part of America, it was mother, she who does not understand America, who made me so. I wonder if, as the American mother I strive to be, I can find a finer example than my own mother!” THE PATHOS OF READJUSTMENT AUTHOR’S PURPOSE IN WRITING The mere writing of this account is a chain, slight, but never to be broken; one that will always bind me to that from which I had thought myself forever cut off. For I am writing not only of myself. In myself I see one hundred thousand young men and women with dark eyes aflame with enthusiasm, or blue eyes alight with hope. In myself, as I write this record, I see the young girl whose father plucked oranges in Italian gardens, the maiden whose mother worked on still mornings in the wide fields of Poland, the young man whose grandmother toiled in the peat bogs of Ireland. I am writing this for myself and for those who, like me, are America’s foster children, to remind us of them, through whose pioneer courage the bright gates of this beautiful land of freedom were opened to us, and upon whose tumuli of gray and weary years of struggle we, their children, rose to our opportunities. I am writing to those sons and daughters of immigrant fathers and mothers who are now in America, and to those who will come after this devastating war to America, and to those who will receive them. MARRIAGE AND AFTER