.. Mis-'ou-ree!"

The foam and the swift wooding-up gave an illusion of speed to the boat
herself, and in what seemed no time at all the empty scows were dropping
away astern; but it was farewell for good and all to the _Westwood_, the
_Antelope_. And now Cat Island, its bend, its chute; Cow Island, its
bend, its chute; Horn Lake, a prehistoric loop of twelve miles, reduced
to three by Horn Lake Bend----

"Come, Ramsey." The call smote like a buffet. Memphis was almost in
sight. In the southwestern corner of Tennessee, just above Tennessee
Chute and the northwestern corner of Mississippi, was the fourth of the
Chickasaw Bluffs. On it sat Memphis, a city with churches, banks, and
the "electromagnetic telegraph." Its twelve thousand people of that day
are a hundred and thirty-five thousand now and have taken in almost out
of remembrance the small settlement of Pickering, or Fort Pickering, on
the down-stream end of the bluff, where the _Votaress_ that beautiful
morning landed and laid to rest Madame Marburg, the bishop, and Basile.

Aboard the _Votaress_, as in Tennessee Chute she faced again the morning
sun, two scenes were enacted at the same time. One took place below, on
the fore-castle; the other above and just aft of it, on the boiler deck.
In the lower there was but a single pine box, in the upper there were
two. In the lower stood the black-gowned priest, the two white-bonneted,
gray-robed sisters, Otto Marburg alone, and here a mass of immigrants
and there a majority of the crew. The upper scene included all the cabin
passengers--ladies seated--and half the boat's family. In fulfilment of
Basile's wish Hugh read: "I am the resurrection and the life." By Hugh's
invitation, given beforehand, the senator delivered a eulogy on the
bishop and added such tender praises of the boy, whom every one had
liked so early and so well, and gilded them with such delicate allusions
to the heroism of his mother, that few eyes were dry. The very twins
wept, though there was a touch of rage in their tears. By choice of the
parson's wife and sweetly led by her, they sang: "I would not live
alway." With streaming eyes Ramsey remembered how yearningly the poor
lad had clung to this dear earth, and she could only sit silent and
modestly wonder how anybody, under any fate that left them power to sing
at all, could sit there--stand there--on that boat, that river, in the
splendor of that sun, the beauty of that landscape, and call life a