Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/27

 gaiety there was indeed scarcely anything of substantial pleasure; it originated rather in a careless insensibility. It was like the glare of the moon-beams, bright, but cold. Such as it was however, it was far more comfortable, than the state of feeling by which it now began to be succeeded. My mind seemed to be filled with indefinite anxieties, of which I could divine neither the causes nor the cure. There was, as it were, a heavy weight upon my bosom, an unsatisfied craving for something, I knew not what, a longing which 1 could do nothing to satisfy, because I could not tell its object. I would be often lost in thought, but my mind did not seem to fix itself to any certain aim, and after hours of apparently the deepest meditation, I should have been very much at a loss to tell about what I had been thinking.

But sometimes my reflections would take a more definite shape. I would begin to consider what I was and what I had to anticipate. The son of a freeman, yet born a slave ! Endowed by nature with abilities, which I should never be permitted to exercise; possessed of knowledge, which already, I found it expedient to conceal! ‘The slave of my own father, the servant of my own brother, a bounded, limited, confined, and captive creature, who did not dare to go out of sight of his master’s house without a written permission to do so! Destined to be the sport, of I knew not whose caprices; forbidden m anything to act for myself, or to.consult my own happiness ; compelled to labor all my life at another’s bidding ; and liable every hour and instant, to oppressions the most outrageous, and degradations the most humiliating !

These reflections soon grew so bitter that I struggled hard to suppress them. But that was not always in my power. Again and again, in spite of all. my efforts, these hateful ideas would start up and sting me into anguish.

My young master still continued kind as ever. I was changing to a man, but he still remained a boy. His protracted ill health, which had checked his growth, appeared also to retard his mental maturity. He seemed every day to fall more and more under my influence ; and every day my attachment to him grew stronger. He was in fact, my