In my case the importance of the day was a hundred times magnified, on account of the years I had waited, the road I had come, and the conscious ambitions I entertained.
I am wearily aware that I am speaking in extreme figures, in superlatives.

I wish I knew some other way to render the mental life of the immigrant child of reasoning age.

I may have been ever so much an exception in acuteness of observation, powers of comparison, and abnormal self-consciousness; none the less were my thoughts and conduct typical of the attitude of the intelligent immigrant child toward American institutions.

And what the child thinks and feels is a reflection of the hopes, desires, and purposes of the parents who brought him overseas, no matter how precocious and independent the child may be.

Your immigrant inspectors will tell you what poverty the foreigner brings in his baggage, what want in his pockets.