before my story far enough to say that. She had, indeed,
been horribly frightened that night, and she was as loath
to go out again into the streets of New York as I should
be to plunge from a safe shore into some terrible,
howling ocean; or, indeed, as one who found himself safe
at home would be to trust himself to the tender
mercies of a tribe of cannibals.

Two such loving women as they were were not long in
building up a language, especially as my mother had
learned from my father and his friends, in her early
life, some of the common words of German--what she called
a bread-and-butter German. For our new inmate was a
Swedish girl. Her story, in short, was this:--

She had been in New York but two days. On the voyage
over, they had had some terrible sickness on the vessel,
and the poor child's mother had died very suddenly and
had been buried in the sea. Her father had died long
before.

This was, as you may think, a terrible shock to her.
But she had hoped and hoped for the voyage to come to an
end, because there was a certain brother of hers in
America whom they were to meet at their landing, and
though she was very lonely on the packet-ship, in which
she and her mother and a certain family of the name of
Hantsen--of whom she had much to say--were the only
Swedes, still she expected to find the brother almost as
soon, as I may say, as they saw the land.