She was in mourning for her father, the sisters told the captain, and she was going to New Orleans to her mother.  She had not seen her mother since she was an infant, on account of some disagreement between the parents, in consequence of which the father had brought her to Cincinnati, and placed her in the convent.  There she had been for twelve years, only going to her father for vacations and holidays.  So long as the father lived he would never let the child have any communication with her mother.  Now that he was dead all that was changed, and the first thing that the girl herself wanted to do was to go to her mother.

The mother superior had arranged it all with the mother of the girl, who was to come personally to the boat in New Orleans, and receive her child from the captain, presenting a letter from the mother superior, a facsimile of which the sisters gave the captain.

It is a long voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans, the rivers doing their best to make it interminable, embroidering themselves ad libitum all over the country.  Every five miles, and sometimes oftener, the boat would stop to put off or take on freight, if not both.  The little convent girl, sitting in the cabin, had her terrible frights at first from the hideous noises attendant on these landings—­the whistles, the ringings of the bells, the running to and fro, the shouting.  Every time she thought it was shipwreck, death, judgment, purgatory; and her sins! her sins!  She would drop her crochet, and clutch her prayer-beads from her pocket, and relax the constraint over her lips, which would go to rattling off prayers with the velocity of a relaxed windlass.  That was at first, before the captain took to fetching her out in front to see the boat make a landing.  Then she got to liking it so much that she would stay all day just where the captain put her, going inside only for her meals.  She forgot herself at times so much that she would draw her chair a little closer to the railing, and put up her veil, actually, to see better.  No one ever usurped her place, quite in front, or intruded upon her either with word or look; for every one learned to know her shyness, and began to feel a personal interest in her, and all wanted the little convent girl to see everything that she possibly could.

[Illustration:  WATCHING A LANDING.]

And it was worth seeing—­the balancing and chasseeing and waltzing of the cumbersome old boat to make a landing.  It seemed to be always attended with the difficulty and the improbability of a new enterprise; and the relief when it did sidle up anywhere within rope’s-throw of the spot aimed at!  And the roustabout throwing the rope from the perilous end of the dangling gang-plank!  And the dangling roustabouts hanging like drops of water from it—­dropping sometimes twenty feet to the land, and not infrequently into the river itself.  And then what a rolling of barrels, and shouldering of sacks, and singing of Jim Crow songs, and pacing of Jim Crow steps; and black skins glistening through torn shirts, and white teeth gleaming through red lips, and laughing, and talking and—­bewildering! entrancing!  Surely the little convent girl in her convent walls never dreamed of so much unpunished noise and movement in the world!