Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/278

 himself from a humble position, after acting many years as an overseer had become the purchaser of Carleton Hall and Poplar Grove, when those two plantations had passed out of the hands of their former proprietors. Having enjoyed very small advantages himself, being, in fact, hardly able to write his name, he had been the more anxious to educate his son, whom he had sent to a northern college, and afterwards to travel in Europe. Unlike a large number of the young men of the south, sent to the north for their education, the young Mason had made a good use of his opportunities; and four or five years before he had returned home, just in time to receive, under the will of his dying father, possession of the estates, and the guardianship of two young. sisters, — and charming little girls they were, — joint heirs with himself of the plantations and the people.

The plantation at Carleton Hall, instead of being worn out and just ready to be deserted, like too many others in that neighborhood, I found to be in a much better state of cultivation than when I had formerly known it. The buildings were all in good repair, and the negro houses were so well clustered, and so neat and tidy, with little gardens about them, as, instead of an unsightly nuisance, as is usually the case, to be real ornaments to the landscape.

Under the profound dissimulation, which slaves know so well how to assume in all its varieties, from stupid indifference to appearances of the strongest emotion, whether joyful or sorrowful, it is often extremely difficult to get at their real feelings. Yet: there was something hardly to be mistaken in the broad, good-natured smile with which, wherever we went, Mr Mason's friendly greeting was looked up for and returned, by young and old, man and maiden, and especially in the joyous clamor with which the children of the plantation gathered about him. We went to see them in the school-room, as he called it, where they were all assembled every day, not to be taught any thing, but to be kept out of mischief, under