Out from behind Fritz Island the Votaress swept northward into a deluge of light from a sun just finishing the first half of his afternoon decline.

Before her lay, far and wide, an expanse of river and shore so fair, without a noticeable sign of man's touch, that one traveller of exceptional moral daring—conversing with the Gilmores and Ramsey—personified the scene as "Nature in siesta." At the steamer's approach the picture—or, as the daring traveller might have insisted, the basking sleeper—seemed to awaken and in a repletion of smiling content to stir and stretch and every here and there to darken and lighten by turns as though closing and opening upon the intruder a multitude of eyes as unnumbered as those of a human sort that looked on the scene, the sleeper, from the beautiful boat.

So for several minutes. Then the Votaress curved into the west till the great twin shadows of her chimneys crept athwart the pilot-house and texas, while more than one passenger of the kind who tell all they know to whoever will hear said that yonder bright mass of cottonwoods and willows, bathing in sunlight directly up the stream, with open water shimmering all round it, was Glasscock Island; that Glasscock Towhead lay hidden behind it just above, and that a towhead was an island in the making. The whole view was such a stimulus to the outpouring of sentiment as well as of information, that one young pair, each succeeding flutter of whose heart-strings was more tenderly entangling them, agreed in undertone that the river's incessant bendings were steps of a Jacob's ladder with these resplendent white steamers for ascending and descending angels.

"Yonder comes another now," said both at once. They pressed forward to the foremost boiler-deck guards, among the many sitters and standers who were trying to determine, by the ornamental form of the stranger's chimney-tops or the peculiar note of her scape-pipes, before her name might show out on paddle-box or pilot-house, whether she was the Chancellor, the Aleck Scott, the Belle Key, or the Magnolia. To be either was to be famous. The next moment she swept into view on the island's sunward side, as pre-eminent in all the scene as though the sun were gone and she were the rising moon. The moon was not her equal in the eyes of those beholders. On every deck, from forecastle to after hurricane roof, there were big spots of vivid color, red, green, blue, never seen in the moon and which were quickly made out to be a high-piled freight of ploughs, harrows, horse-mills, carts, and wagons destined for the ever-widening Southern fields of corn and cotton, sugar and rice. The passenger with the pocket spy-glass—there is always one—proclaimed that her boiler deck was hung full—as no deck of the moon ever is—of the finest spoils of the hunt: geese, swan, venison, and bear; while the nakedest eye could see at a glance that from forward gangway to sternmost guard her bull railings were up, and a closer scrutiny revealed that the main load of her freight deck was every farm-bred sort of living four-footed beast: horses, mules, beeves, cows, swine, and sheep. She did not pass near though unaware of the distress she avoided; but in courtly exaggeration she sent across the intervening mile a double salute, white plumes of sunlit steam from her whistle—the new mode—and the gentler voice of her bell, the older form. The course of the Votaress lay on the island's eastern side, and the hail and response of the two crafts had hardly ceased to echo from the various shores, or hats to wave and handkerchiefs to flutter, when the flood between them began to widen, a thousand feet to the half minute, and they parted.

At the same time, from the middle of the boiler deck floated a sound ordinarily most welcome but at this time a distasteful surprise: the dinner-bell again. Not with festal din, however, it called, but with each solitary note drawn out through a full second or more, church-steeple fashion, and with a silken veil tied on its tongue to give each stroke a solemn softness and illusion of distance. Small wonder that the most of the company, just risen from "a plumb bait," turned that way and stared, seeing old Joy, with joyless face, tolling out the notes in persistent monotone while in front of her stood the Gilmores at either side of a chair, and on the chair, also standing, the daughter of Gideon Hayle. With her hands and eyes fastened upon a written notice and with the bell tolling steadily at her back she tremblingly read aloud:

"Fellow travellers: Please assemble at once in the ladies' cabin to supplicate the divine mercy for a stay of the scourge on this boat, and in concerted worship to seek spiritual preparation for whatever awaits us in the further hours of our voyage. In the absence of Bishop So-and-So, who is ministering to the sick, and at his request, the meeting will be conducted by the celebrated comedians Mr. and Mrs. Gilmore, late of Placide's Varieties, New Orleans."

The art of advertising being then in its swaddling-bands, this specimen of it struck its hearers as really creditable. While it was being read two or three men rose, and one, uncommonly shaggy and of towering height, could hardly wait for the last word before he responded with the voice of a hound on the trail: "By the Lord Harry, sis', amen! says I, that's jest my size! I'm a Babtis' exhorteh an' I know the theÂtre air the mouth o' hell, but ef you play-acto's good enough to run a prah-meet'n, I'm bad enough to go to it. Come on, gentlemen, the whole k'boodle of us, come on."

Some brightly, some darkly, a good halfdozen followed him into the cabin; but the most remained seated, staring at Ramsey from head to foot and back again, some brightly, some darkly, while the bell persevered behind her. She sunk to her knees in the chair. Gilmore addressed that half of the company on his side of her: "Please assemble at once, will you, all, in the ladies' cabin."

And his wife, on her side, repeated: "Will you all please assemble at once in the ladies' cabin."

A few more rose, but still the many, brightly or darkly, only stared on, the bell persisting. The kneeling Ramsey again began to read:

"Fellow travellers: Please assemble at once in the ladies' cabin to supplicate the divine mercy for a stay of the scourge on this boat, and in concerted worship——"

"Oh, well!" some one laughingly broke in, "if that's your game—" and the whole company, in good-natured surrender, arose and went in. But the "bell-ringers," as they were promptly nicknamed, passed on to further conquests.

When at length they turned to join the assemblage the four had doubled their number. With Ramsey was the commodore. With the actor was Watson. With Mrs. Gilmore came old Joy, and, strange to tell, due to some magic in the tact of the senior Courteneys, the senator, no longer making botch work of his guile, walked with Hugh, displaying a good-natured loquacity which he was glad to have every one notice and from which he ceased reluctantly as they parted, finding no place to sit together. The player and his wife, over-looking the throng, complacently discovered standing-room only, and the meeting which Hayle's daughter had pledged herself and them to "run" was running itself. For hardly had they entered the saloon when, from a front seat and without warning, the exhorter exploded the stalwart old hymn-tune of "Kentucky," and soon all but a scant dozen of the company followed in full cry, though hardly with the fulness of the leader's voice, that rolled through the cabin like tropical thunder:

From the chairman's seat the actor kept a corner of one eye on Ramsey and as the hymn's last line rolled away he stood up. She had not sung, but neither had she laughed. No one could have seen the moment's huge grotesqueness larger, yet to the relief of many she had kept her poise. In her mind was the bishop, overhead in the texas, consciously imperilling his life to save her brother's soul, and in the face of all drolleries she strenuously kept her ardor centred on the gravest significancies of the hour, as if the bishop's success up there hung on the efficiency with which this work of his earlier appointment should be done, down here, in his absence. She saw in the exhorter a tragic as well as comic problem. Nor was he her only perplexity. Another, she feared, might easily arise through some clash of any two kinds of worshippers each devoted to its own set forms. Certain main features, she knew, had been carefully prearranged, yet as the actor stood silent about to ask the Vicksburger to lead in prayer she tingled with all the exhilaration a ruder soul might have felt in hunting ferocious game or in fighting fire. Her soul rose a-tiptoe for the moment when the Presbyterians, who also had not sung, should stand up to pray, while the few Episcopalians, kneeling forward, and the many Baptists and Methodists, kneeling to the rear, should find themselves face to face—nose to nose, anxiously thought Ramsey—with only the open backs of the chairs between. She was herself the last to kneel, kneeling forward but doubting if she ought not to face the other way, hardly knowing whether she was a Catholic or a Methodist; and she was much the last to close her eyes. But the various postures were taken without a jar and the modest Vicksburger prayed. His words were neither impromptu nor printed, but, as every one quickly perceived and Ramsey had known beforehand, were memorized and were fresh from the pen of the actor. Diffidence warped the first phrase or two, but soon each word came clear, warm from the heart, and reaching all hearts, however borne back by the rapturous yells with which the exhorter broke in at every pause.

"And though to our own sight," pleaded the supplicant, "we are but atoms in thy boundless creation, we yet believe that prayer offered thee in love, humility, and trust cannot offend. Wherefore in this extremity of grief and disaster we implore thee for deliverance."

Close at Ramsey's back, in the only seat whose occupant her diligent eye had failed to light on, a kneeler heaved a sigh so piteous that it startled her like an alarum.

But the prayer went on: "Drive from us, O Lord, this pestilence. Allow it no more toll of life or agony. Have mercy on us all, both the sick and the sound."

"Have mercy," moaned the suffering voice behind, and Ramsey, suffering with it, wished she had been Methodist enough to kneel with her face that way.

"Spare not our earthly lives alone," continued the supplicant, "but save our immortal souls. Pardon in us every error of the present moment and of all our past. Forgive us every fault of character inherited or acquired."

"God, forgive!" sighed the voice behind, in so keen a contrition that Ramsey, while the supplication in front pressed on, found herself in tears of her own penitence. The mourner at her back began responsively to repeat each word of the prayer as it came and presently Ramsey was doing likewise, striving the while, with all her powers, to determine whose might be the voice which distress so evidently disguised even from its owner.

"Enable us, our Maker," she pleaded in time with the voice behind, that followed the voice in front, "henceforth to grow in thy likeness, and in thy strength to devote ourselves joyfully to the true and diligent service of the world wherein thou hast set us. Grant us, moreover, we pray, such faith in thee and to thee that in every peril or woe, to-day, to-morrow, or in years to come, we may without doubt or fear commit all we have, are, and hope for, temporal or immortal, alike unto thee. And, finally, we beg thee to grant us in this immediate issue a courage for ourselves and compassion for all others which, come what may, living or dying, will gird us so to acquit ourselves that in the end we may stand before thee unashamed and by thy mercy and thy love be welcomed into thine own eternal joy."

"Amen!" cried the exhorter and burst anew into song:

He ceased and flashed a glance, first up to Hugh, whose hand lay on his shoulder, and then over to the standing player. A hush was on the reseated company, and its united gaze on Ramsey and the mourner who with her had been audibly following the prayer. Two seats from her Mrs. Gilmore vainly tried to catch her eye. The penitent was in his seat again. He bent low forward, his face in his hands, and face and hands hid in his thick fair locks. Ramsey had turned toward him with a knee in her chair, a handkerchief pressed fiercely against her lips, and her drowned eyes gazing down on him. But as the actor was about to speak she wheeled toward him and stood with an arm beseechingly thrown out, her voice breaking in her throat.