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feet, struck Machebeuf’s leg, which swelled and gave pain for two days. A passenger who saw the accident said, “a few feet closer, and Machebeuf’s mission would have ended.”
    On the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, Low Masses were quietly said by the two bishops and the Bavarian friar—these in place of the traditional ten o’clock High Mass which Purcell decided not to sing out of recognition of the views of the surrounding Protestants, who did not hold with the cult of the Virgin Mary, and who would have thought the Catholics absurdly deranged in their practices. But that evening the travelling clergy privately sang the litany of the VirginMary and other holy canticles as the ship leaned her way on westward.
    Sunrise and sunset at sea were the great events of the day. Imaginations worked to find celestial mountains and castles in the clouds, and flocks of sheep, bands of great horses, parades of soldiers; and then the light would change and there would remain only sea and sky, day on day, for forty-three days.
    But on the forty-third day, they heard the captain cry out, “Land, land!” and all strained to see. Those without spy-glasses saw nothing at first, not having the eyes of mariners; but when at last they saw Long Island, in the evening of 20 August, they rejoiced in the sight of houses, farms, forts, woods, lighthouses, telegraph pylons, and knew that by the next morning they would disembark at the port of New York after a voyage of forty-four days.
    As they came up the bay, which was “magnificent,” they began to see the spires of the city. At the quarantine station in the Narrows, the Sylvie de Grasse anchored offshore. A steam lighter came to take passengers off—all but the steerage Germans, who must remain on board for two days to fulfill quarantine requirements—and brought them to the docks of South street, where the bowsprits of moored ships extended like a lattice roof above the clamorous traffic on the cobblestones below.
    Purcell and his party, all in good health, were conducted across town by two friends from Cincinnati to pay a call upon Bishop Dubois of New York. After more than six weeks of inaction at sea, the travellers felt animation and purpose. They would leave the very next day on their journey inland. Purcell was not one to waste time, and there were still three hundred leagues to go until they should come to Cincinnati, nineteen days later. Their first duty on the inland journey was to pay respects to Archbishop Eccleston at Baltimore.
    Going by canal, they found themselves in a cabined flatboat which resembled Noah’s ark in a child’s drawing. The barge was drawn by horse teams on the tow paths, the movement was at the pace of a horse’s walk, and the passengers from France had their first view of farther America as it went slowly past the narrow windows of the cabin. The barges of the day combined flourishes with discomforts. Some of them contained small musical organs on which itinerant “professors” played concerts. In 1842 Charles Dickens travelled in a barge in whose common cabin men and women were separated only by a drawn curtain. The sleeping bunks were let down from the wall, were sixteen inches wide “exactly,” and had to be vacated soon after daybreak to serve as seating benches. Dickens was obliged to wash in dirty canal water poured into a tin basin which was chained to the wall for the use of all passengers, and to dry himself must use thesingle roller towel provided for all. If the weather was mild, passengers rode on top of the cabin, and on moonlit nights, passing through hills or gorges—for the canal boats went along by day and night—saw how the wilderness scenery held every gleam and shadow of dreamlike strangeness, in the manner of romantic painting.
    At Baltimore, the party transferred to stage coaches pulled by four horses at a fast sustained trot. There were three ranks of