Pitch into the cow and get some more milk, is my motto." The suspension of the banking-house was bad enough, but there was an attending circumstance that gave us, at Rivermouth, a great deal more anxiety.

The cholera, which someone predicted would visit the country that year, and which, indeed, had made its appearance in a mild form at several points along the Mississippi River, had broken out with much violence at New Orleans.
The report that first reached us through the newspapers was meagre and contradictory; many people discredited it; but a letter from my mother left us no room for doubt.

The sickness was in the city.

The hospitals were filling up, and hundreds of the citizens were flying from the stricken place by every steamboat.

The unsettled state of my father's affairs made it imperative for him to remain at his post; his desertion at that moment would have been at the sacrifice of all he had saved from the general wreck.
As he would be detained in New Orleans at least three months, my mother declined to come North without him.
After this we awaited with feverish impatience the weekly news that came to us from the South.