utched by the
nurse, released by him, she still looked wildly down, seeing little yet
much. At their back the great bell boomed. The boat's stem began to turn
to the forested shore. A glare of torches at the lower guards crimsoned
the flood under the bows. She flashed round accusingly upon Hugh:

"What are we landing in the woods for?"

He met her gaze and it fell. Her mother tried to draw her away but she
dropped to her knees at the rail and bent her eyes upon a dark group
compacting below. Hugh muttered to his grandfather:

"She'd better leave the boat. She'd rather."

Catching the words, she leaped and stood, her head thrown high. "I
wouldn't! I won't!"

She glared on him through brimming tears, but something about him,
repeated and exaggerated in the twins as she whipped round to them,
reversed her mood. She smote her brow into her mother's bosom and, under
the stress of a silvery laugh that would not be stifled, hung to the
maternal neck and rocked from side to side.

XI

FIRST NIGHT-WATCH

Often through the first half of that night, while many other matters
pressed on them, the minds of the three Courteneys turned to one theme.
Ramsey's inquiries had called it up and the presence and plight of the
immigrants, down below, kept it before them: the story of Hugh's
grandmother, born and bred in Holland.

With Hugh standing by, the girl had drawn its recital from his
grandfather; as whose bride that grandmother had been an immigrant, like
these, though hardly in their forlorn way and with Philadelphia, not New
Orleans, for a first goal. Thence, years later, with husband and child,
she had reached and traversed this wild river, when it was so much
wilder, and had dwelt in New Orleans throughout her son's, John
Courteney's, boyhood. Thence again, in his twenty-first year, she had
recrossed the water to inherit an estate and for seven years had lived
in great ports and capitals of Europe, often at her husband's side, yet
often, too, far from him, as he--leaving his steamboats to good captains
and the mother to her son--came and went on commercial adventures
ocean-wide. It was these first seven years of John Courteney's manhood,
spent in transatlantic study, society, public affairs, and a father's
partnership, that had made him--what Ramsey saw.

The tale was fondly told and had made Hugh feel very homespun compared
with such progenitors. But Ramsey had looked him up and down as if he
must have all his