I was too young to understand it all, but I remember going with my father and mother in the carriage every time they carried one of my sisters to the graveyard.
The next strange thing to happen was the arrival in the house of a box much larger than the others. I did not know what it could be for. The box was very rough looking. It was made of unplaned boards. My nurse told me it was for my mother. Again I took my stand by the window. "Bring out—bring out your dead!" resounded mournfully in the street just below the window where I stood. I looked out, and there was the "dead wagon." It had come for my mother.
I was astonished to find that they did not throw the box containing my mother into the wagon. It was too large and heavy. Four or five men had to come into the house and take out the box. It was marked "To the Train Vaults," and was put into the wagon with the other boxes containing dead bodies. Only my father and I sat in the carriage that went to the cemetery and to the vaults that day. There were my mother and my three little sisters; all had been swept from me in this St. Pierre style—in this volcano of yellow fever.
Finally there came one day a letter from my grandmother, the wife of the old Methodist itinerant preacher of Waltham: "Send on some one of the family, before they are all dead. Send George." And so my father made preparations to send me back to Massachusetts. I can remember now the exact wording of the card he wrote and pinned on my coat, just like the label or tag on a bag of coffee. It read:
"This is my little son George Francis Train. Four years old. Consigned on board the ship Henry to John Clarke, Jr., Dock Square, Boston; to be sent to his Grandmother Pickering, at Waltham, ten miles from Boston. Take good care of the Little Fellow, as he is the only one left of eleven of us in the house, including the servants [slaves]. I will come on as soon as I can arrange my Business."
I remember how we went down to the ship in the river. She lay out in the broad, muddy Mississippi, and seven other vessels lay between her and the shore. Planks were laid on the bank, or "levee," as they called the shore in New Orleans, and up to the side of the nearest ship. We climbed over these planks and passed over the seven vessels, and came to the Henry. My father kissed me good-by, and left me on board the ship.
There I was, aboard this great vessel—for so she seemed to me then—a little boy, without nurse or guardian to look after me. I was just so much freight. I was part of the cargo. We floated down the Mississippi slowly, and floated on and on toward the Gulf. We were floating out into the great waters, into the great world, floating through the waters of Gulf and ocean, floating along in the Gulf Stream, and floating on toward my Northern home.
Thus I was floating, when I began my life anew; and I have been floating for seventy years!
When my father said good-by to me, kissing me as we passed over the last of the seven ships between the Henry and the shore, I saw him put a handkerchief to his face, as if to hide from me the tears that were in his eyes. He feared that my little heart would break down under the strain. But I didn't cry. Everything was so new to me. I was too small to realize all that the parting meant and all that had led up to it. I could not feel that I was leaving behind me all the members of my family—in the vaults of the graveyard. The ship seemed a new world to me. I had no eyes for tears—only for wonderment.
For many years afterward I heard nothing of my father. He had dropped below the horizon when I floated down the Mississippi, and I saw and heard nothing more of him. As my mother and three sisters had been buried together in New Orleans, we had taken it for granted that father had followed them to the grave, a victim of the same pestilence. But nothing was known as to this for many years.