its barricade
of levees.

"Dear me!" shuddered Cordelia. "I don't believe I'd have slept a wink
last night if I'd realized how _much_ below the river we were. Only
fancy if one of those levees had sprung a leak!"

"Why, they'd have sent for the plumber, of course," observed Tilly,
gravely.

"Of course! Still--they don't look very leaky, to me," laughed
Genevieve.

"Was it here, or somewhere else, that a man (or was it a child?) put his
arm (or was it a finger?) in a little hole in the wall and stopped the
leak, and so saved the town?" mused Bertha aloud dreamily.

"Of course it was," answered Tilly with grave emphasis; and not until
the others laughed did Bertha wake up enough to turn her back with a
shrug.

"Well, it was somewhere, anyhow," she pouted.

"As if we could doubt that--after what you said," murmured Tilly.

"But they have had floods here, haven't they?" questioned Alma Lane.

Genevieve gave a sudden laugh. At the others' surprised look she
explained:

"Oh, I'm not laughing at the real floods, the _water_ floods they've
had, of course. It's just that I happened to think of something I read
some time ago. They had one flood here of--molasses."

"Mo--lass--es!" chorused several voices.

"Yes. A big tank that the city used to have for a reservoir had been
bought by a sugar company and turned into a storage for molasses. Well,
it burst one day, and a little matter of a million gallons of molasses
went exploring through the streets. They say some poor mortals had
actually to wade to dry land."

"Genevieve! what a story," cried Elsie.

"But it's true," declared Genevieve. "A whole half-mile square of the
city was flooded, honestly. At least, the newspapers said it was."

"How the pickaninnies must have gloried in it," giggled Tilly, "--if
they liked 'bread and perlashes' as well as I used to. Only think of
having such a _big_ saucerful to dip your bread into!"

"Tilly!" groaned Genevieve.

They were at Port Chalmette, now. The Crescent City lay behind them, and
beyond lay the shining river-roadway, with its fertile,
highly-cultivated plantations bordering each side, green and beautiful.

"How perfectly, perfectly lovely!" cried Elsie. "And I'm not sick one
bit."

"Naturally not--yet," laughed Tilly. "But you just wait. We don't sail
the Mississippi all the way to New York, you know."

"I wish we did," said Genevieve, her eyes dreamily following the shore
line. "But we're only on it for