Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/266

246 by loud response of approbation and applause, sometimes in deafening shouts of indignation, defiance, and conscience-stricken dread.





reached Richmond on my southern journey, I found that city also showing the general alarm. A committee of vigilance for the suppression of incendiary publications was vigorously at work; and as we drove into the town, a great bonfire was burning in the main street, consisting of publications lately seized and condemned. One of the books thus burnt at the stake was made up, I was told, entirely of extracts from speeches delivered within a few years past in the Virginia house of delegates, in which the evils of slavery had been pretty strongly depicted. But whatever liberty of that sort might previously have been allowed, nothing of the kind was to be tolerated for the future.

At Richmond I procured a horse and servant, — for in Lower Virginia there were no public conveyances, — and set off on a visit to Spring Meadow, my birthplace. To satisfy inquiries, — since any traveller, a stranger and unknown, was at that time liable to suspicion, — I gave out that, on a former visit to the country, many years before, I had become acquainted — with the family at Spring Meadow, to which, indeed, I claimed a distant relationship. As I began to approach that neighborhood, I found the aspect of desolation and desertion characteristic enough of Virginia as I remembered it, and as I now again saw it, growing more and more marked. As I rode along absorbed in thought, my eyes at length met an object which I recognized, being no other than the shop and dwelling-house of Mr Jemmy Gordon, situated