Never leaning back--oh, no!
always straight and stiff, as if the conventual back board were there
within call. She would eat only convent fare at first, notwithstanding
the importunities of the waiters, and the jocularities of the captain,
and particularly of the clerk. Every one knows the fund of humor
possessed by a steamboat clerk, and what a field for display the table
at meal-times affords. On Friday she fasted rigidly, and she never
began to eat, or finished, without a little Latin movement of the lips
and a sign of the cross. And always at six o'clock of the evening she
remembered the angelus, although there was no church bell to remind
her of it.
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.
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