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.
We were anxious to have all the bodies brought together in one graveyard in the North and buried side by side. The family burying-ground was at Waltham, where eight generations were then sleeping--that is, eight generations of Pickerings and Bemises. There were the bodies of my great-grandmother, and of ancestors belonging to the first Colonial days. My cousin, George Pickering Bemis, Mayor of Omaha, afterward had a monument erected over the spot where so many Bemises and Pickerings lay in their long rest, to preserve their memory. But my father's body was never to rest there; nor was it ever seen by any of his relatives.
My uncle, John Clarke, Jr., who had brought me out of New Orleans and rescued me from the plague, tried to find some trace of my father; but no record or vestige of him could be found in that city. Every trace of him had been swept away. His very existence there had been forgotten, erased. No one could be found who had ever heard of him, or knew anything about his store. So completely had the pestilence done its terrible work of destruction and obliteration. As this period was prior to the invention of the daguerreotype, we had no photographs of him. The only likenesses that were made then were expensive miniatures on ivory. I have no picture of him, except the one I carry forever in my memory.