The flag of Holland floated aft of a deck crowded with a sun-tanned and oddly clad multitude. The Dutch sailors lowered their fenders between the ship's side and the boat's guards, lines were made fast, a light stage was run down from the ship's upper deck to the boat's forecastle, and in single file, laden with their household goods, the silent aliens were hurried aboard the _Votaress_ and to their steerage quarters, out of sight between and behind her engines. Up on the boiler and hurricane decks her earlier passengers found, according to their various moods and capacities, much entertainment in the scene. The girl with the nurse laughed often, of course. Yet her laugh bore a certain note of sympathy and appreciation which harmonized out of it all quality that might have hurt or abashed the most diffident exile. Childlike as she was, it was plain she did not wholly fail to see into the matter's pathetic depths. The youth at the derrick post, scrutinizing each immigrant that passed under his eye, could hear at his back a refined voice making kind replies to her many questions. He knew it as belonging to the older of the two men for whose coming aboard the _Votaress_ had delayed her start. Between the girl's whimsical queries he heard him indulgently explain that the Dutch ensign's red, white, and blue were no theft from us Americans and that at various periods he had lived in four or five great cities under those three colors as flown and loved by four great nations. Amazing! She could not query fast enough. "First city?" First in London, where he had been born and reared. "And then?" Then in Amsterdam, where he had been married. "And then?" Then for ten years in Philadelphia. "And then?" Why, then, for forty years more, down to that present 1852, in New Orleans, while nevertheless, save for the last ten, he had sojourned much abroad in many ports and capitals, but mainly in Paris. The girl's note of mirth softly persisted, irrepressible but self-oblivious, a mere accent of her volatile emotions, most frequent among which was a delighted wonder in looking on the first man of foreign travel, first world-citizen, with whom she had ever awarely come face to face. So guessed the youth, well pleased. Presently, as if she too had guessed something, she asked if the boat's master was not this man's son. He now running it? Yes, he was. "And was he, too, born in England?--or in Holland?" "In Philadelphia, 1803." "And did he, too, marry a--Dutch--wife?" "No, a young lady of Philadelphia, in 1832; an American." "Did you ever see Andrew Jackson?" "Yes, I knew him." "Were you in the battle of New Orleans?" "Yes, I commanded a battery." "Did you know anybody else besides Jackson? Who else?" "Oh, I knew them all; Claiborne, Livingston, Duncan, Touro, Sheppard, Grimes, the two Lafittes, Dominique You, Coffee, Villere, Roosevelt----"