on the landing-place of the German steamers at Jersey City--a huge
wooden shed covering a wooden wharf which resounded under the feet,
an expanse palisaded with rough-hewn piles that leaned this way and
that, and bestrewn with masses of heterogeneous luggage. At one
end; toward the town, was a row of tall painted palings, behind
which he could distinguish a press of hackney-coachmen, who
brandished their whips and awaited their victims, while their voices
rose, incessant, with a sharp strange sound, a challenge at once
fierce and familiar. The whole place, behind the fence, appeared to
bristle and resound. Out there was America, Count Otto said to
himself, and he looked toward it with a sense that he should have to
muster resolution. On the wharf people were rushing about amid
their trunks, pulling their things together, trying to unite their
scattered parcels. They were heated and angry, or else quite
bewildered and discouraged. The few that had succeeded in
collecting their battered boxes had an air of flushed indifference
to the efforts of their neighbours, not even looking at people with
whom they had been fondly intimate on the steamer. A detachment of
the officers of the Customs was in attendance, and energetic
passengers were engaged in attempts to drag them toward their
luggage or to drag heavy pieces toward them. These functionaries
were good-natured and taciturn, except when occasionally they
remarked to a passenger whose open trunk stared up at them,
eloquent, imploring, that they were afraid the voyage had been
"rather glassy." They had a friendly leisurely speculative way of
discharging their duty, and if they perceived a victim's name
written on the portmanteau they addressed him by it in a tone of old
acquaintance. Vogelstein found however that if they were familiar
they weren't indiscreet. He had heard that in America all public
functionaries were the same, that there wasn't a different tenue, as