Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/267

 at the crotch of the roads, some six or seven miles from Spring Meadow. It was a fine, warm, summer afternoon, and on a rude bench or settle beside the door was sitting, more asleep than awake, an old gentleman, who, to the best of my recollection, could be no other than Mr Jemmy himself. I accordingly addressed him as Mr Gordon, when he roused himself up, did the honors of the house with a grace, and bade me walk in and refresh myself with a glass of peach brandy. He confessed, however, that I had the. advantage of him, as he found it impossible to recollect my name. I endeavored to remind him of a young Mr Moore, an Englishman, who, so twenty years before, had passed a week or two a Spring Meadow, and more than once had ridden by his shop; and after a good deal of nodding, thinking and muttering to himself, he declared at last that he recollected me perfectly. When I inquired after Spring Meadow and its occupants, Mr Gordon shook his head mournfully. "Gone, sir, all gone to rack and ruin. Colonel Moore, in his old age, was obliged to move off somewhere to Alabama, with such of the hands as he could save from the clutch of the sheriff; and that's the last I've heard of him. The old. plantation has been abandoned these ten years; and the last time I was by there, the roof of the mansion house was all tumbling in. As I knew there was no house nearer than Gordon's, I begged of him to entertain me for a day or two, while I took a turn round the old plantation. From my conversation with him, I learnt that, with the decrease of the population in the neighborhood, his trade had fallen off, and that he, too, had serious thoughts, old as he was, of moving off to Alabama, or somewhere else at the south-west. Early the next morning, leaving my servant and horse behind me, I set off on foot. But

I was no sooner out of sight of Jemmy Gordon's house than I directed my steps, not to Spring Meadow, but to that old deserted plantation on the higher