Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/369

Rh fingers, and then came and asked how one liked America? Usch! There are no greater contrasts than exist between the cultivated and the uncultivated ladies of this country.

One mother with her daughter pleased me nevertheless by their appearance and their evident mutual affection. But just as I was about to make some advances to the mother, she began with the question whether the United States answered my expectations? And that operated upon me like a bomb.

I spent my time, for the most part, quietly in my own cabin, finding companionship in my books, and in the spectacle presented by the banks of the river. When evening came, and with it candles, I had the amusement of the children's going to bed in the saloon, for there were not berths for them all. There was among the passengers one young mother, not above thirty years old, with eight children, the youngest still at the breast. She had gone with her husband and children to settle in the far West in some one of the Mississippi states, but the husband had fallen ill of cholera on the way, and died within four- and- twenty hours. And now the young mother was returning with all her fatherless little ones to her paternal home. She was still very pretty, and her figure delicate. Although now and then a tear might be seen trickling down her cheek as she sate in the evening nursing her little baby, yet she did not seem overcome by her loss, or greatly cast down. Seven of the children, four boys and three girls, were laid each evening in one large bed, made upon a long mattress, exactly in front of my door, without any other bedding than this mattress and a coverlet thrown over them. I had a deal of amusement in a little lad of three years old, a regular Cupid, both in head and figure, whose little shirt scarcely reached to his middle. He could not manage to be comfortable in the general bed, and longed probably for the warm