Then come a more canny couple—two manny-clad, bright-faced boys, Scotch bairns, as their pretty dialect reveals. One is ten and the other eleven years old; and these bit laddies are making the journey all the way alone from Loch Lomond to Loch Michigan; billed and ticketed to their widower father in Chicago. It is a picnic to them, you can see, yet in their childish faces there is a sedate gravity, such as belongs to the earnest race of the Covenanters. Nearly six hundred children last year came thus alone “over the back of the round sea” to seek parents or friends. There are in the United States Senate, in gubernatorial chairs, at the head of great industries, in leading positions of all kinds, other boys who in other years came thus alone to the land of promise. So we despise not the day of small things at Castle Garden, says our attentive _chaperon_. The most out-of-place delegate that I saw here was a Bedouin Arab. “What sought he thus afar!” Very tall and slender and sinewy; swarthy skin, black, close-cropped hair, intensely black stubbed beard, behind and amidst which his white teeth, constantly exposed like a bull-dog’s, shine like a battery behind a bristling _chevaux de frise_. His head is raised, his nostrils dilated, his black, piercing eyes look far away over the unseen crowds; he moves restlessly with a swift, cat-like tread and an undulatory motion of his long, lithe body, like that of a tiger. He seems a veritable wild beast at bay, and I watch from a respectful distance to see him pounce down on some unsuspecting emigrant. Yet might not this animal some day turn up an alderman in a “growing city,” having first studied law? ’Twere not to consider too curiously to consider so; no, faith, not a jot. I admit it were some time a paradox, but now our time gives it proof. Plenty of romances and not a few tragedies are enacted or consummated here. If the re-unions that take place in this old fort consecrate it to humanity, and make it a temple of affection, its disappointments make it a theater for melodramas and tragedies in reality. Last year one hundred and fifty-three emigrants were sent to the insane asylum on Ward’s Island, East River, a large proportion of whom were young people, and a majority women. They come over to find their mates, and either do not meet them, or worse, find they have lost them indeed. Thence they become aliens to the whole universe and find their only home in the Fantastic Realm. Melancholia is the prevalent form of aberration. The shock of transplanting and the excitement of new scenes upon simple and undeveloped natures are also a pregnant cause of mental overthrow. A little negro boot black, contemplating the insane asylum, said to me reflectively, “I think anybody is foolish to go crazy.” As three-fourths of the crazy ones here are unmarried, it might seem foolish to expose themselves when so simple a remedy is so available as marriage is here.