I well remember the journey down the Rhine to Cologne, where we visited the beautiful cathedral before we took the train to Bremen; the solemn interview in the latter city at the offices of the North German Lloyd, where the last formalities were disposed of; and finally settling in our cabins of the slow old steamer Hermann as she put forth on her way across the wide Atlantic.

My memories of the eleven-day voyage itself are rather vague. I recall playing around the deck with the other family of children on the ship. The daughter of one of those little playmates is now conducting a private school in New York City which three of my granddaughters attend. I remember, too, that on the stormiest day of our passage, I was proud of being the only child well enough to eat his meals, and that the Captain honoured me with a seat beside him at his table.

Now, the newcomer to America, arriving at New York, stands on the deck of a swift liner and is welcomed by the Statue of Liberty and overwhelmed by the vaulting office-buildings springing high into the blue. I shall tell later how I have contributed to the creation of some of them. But on that June day of my arrival, in 1866, I simply felt that one of the momentous hours in my life had come, when I found myself stepping ashore into a vast garden of unlimited opportunities.

CHAPTER II
SCHOOL DAYS

MY family took up their residence at 92 Congress Street, Brooklyn, which my elder brothers and two sisters, our pioneers, had prepared for us, and though handicapped as we were by our small knowledge of English, we younger children began our studies at the De Graw Street Public School in the September following our arrival. Eight months later, on the first day of May, 1867, we moved to Manhattan.

It was a very simple New York to which we came. In domestic economy, portières were unknown, rugs a rarity; ingrain carpets, costing about sixty cents a yard, were the usual floor coverings; when the walls were papered, it was with the cheapest material; the only bathtubs were of zinc, and one to a house was the almost universal rule. Our home was No. 1121 Second Avenue, corner of Fifty-ninth Street—a three-storey, high-stoop brownstone house, rows of which were then being erected. It still stands there, the high stoop removed from it; stores are in the basements; the district has deteriorated to one of cheap tenements and small retail businesses. But in those days there was an effort to make Upper Second Avenue one of the chief residential streets of the city. The householders were mostly well-to-do Germans—people who had prospered on the Lower East Side and had outgrown their quarters there. The monotony of the thoroughfare was relieved only by the old-fashioned horse car that rumbled by every four or five minutes. Like the letter carriers of that period, neither the drivers nor the conductors wore uniforms. The line ended at Sixty-fourth Street where the truck-gardens began. On our way to Sunday School, at Thirty-ninth Street near Seventh Avenue, we would make a short-cut across the site where the first Grand Central Station was being erected.

I had my little difficulties in school: I well remember how one of the boys told me that he deeply sympathized with me, because I would have to overcome the double handicap of being both a Jew and a German. So I greatly rejoiced when I saw the steady disappearance of the prejudice against the Germans after they had succeeded in winning the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.

About the most picturesque and artistic parade that had ever taken place in New York was arranged by all the German societies and their sympathizers, the singing clubs and the turn vereins participating. Non-Germans lent their carriages. Among the generous people was the famous Dr. Hemholdt, of patent medicine fame. He owned a rather fantastic vehicle, which was drawn by five horses decorated with white cockades and which he lent for the occasion to an uptown club of which my brother was the secretary. I was permitted to fill in, so that I saw with my own eyes and was deeply impressed by the crowds that lined the streets and vociferously and heartily, for the first time, gave their unstinted approval of the Germans.

We children did not lose a day in our pursuit of education; for on the very day of our removal to Manhattan, I attended Grammar School No. 18, in Fifty-first Street near Lexington Avenue. At recess-time we boys used to play “tag” on the foundations of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the construction of which had been stopped during the Civil War. I have very pleasant recollections of my early grammar school teachers, and especially of one who later was for years Clerk of the Board of Education, the efficient Lawrence D. Kiernan, who, while at School 18, was elected to the Assembly as a candidate of the “Young Democrats” and whose talks to us pupils on civic duty seemed like great orations and gave me my first impression of independence in politics.

Nevertheless, I laboured under two disadvantages—one was my English; the difference in structure between my native and my adopted language gave me considerable trouble; so did the pronunciation of the letters w and d, but my greatest difficulty was the diphthong th, and to overcome it, I compiled and learned lists of words in which it occurred and for weeks devoted some time, night and morning, to repeating: “Theophilus Thistle, the great thistle-sifter, sifted one sieve-full of unsifted thistles through the thick of his thumb.” However, as the greatest stress was laid on proficiency in arithmetic, and as I had a natural aptitude for that study, my proficiency there balanced these deficiencies and took me into the highest class at the age of eleven.