Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/305

 been taken as prisoners, and whence, by the aid of the blue-eyed little girl, we had effected our escape, carrying with us the spoils of Egypt, in the shape of the clothes and money of our captors. With minds excited as mine had been by the incidents of that eventful escape, the whole scene, with all its surroundings, stamps itself wonderfully on the memory. I could recall exactly the general appearance of the ° road, as we had been dragged along, fastened to the saddles of our captors, and of the little hedge tavern, as it had first appeared in sight; and no sooner did I again see it, than I recognized it at once for the very same. Indeed, there was the less difficulty in doing that, since, in the whole of my horseback journey, I had not found a single house which had any appearance of newness about it; nor were houses of such frequent occurrence as to tend much to confuse one's recollection. Twenty years had made very little change in that part of the country. As the house still had the external appearance of a tavern, or at least of a whiskey shop, I determined to stop a while to reconnoitre.

A stout and rather good-looking boy of twelve or fourteen, without hat or shoes, and with no other clothes than a shirt, not lately washed, and the tattered fragments of a pair of pantaloons, so much too large for him as probably to have been his father's, took my horse as I dismounted at the door, and promised to provide him with water and corn, Walking into the single room which served for kitchen, bar room, dining and sleeping room for the family, the only other room in the house being reserved for guests, I observed an old crone of a woman sitting by the window, zealously plying a loom in which she was weaving a piece of coarse homespun. Two small children, who were rolling and tumbling on the floor, spoke to her as "granny." She might doubtless have once been the mistress of the family, but seemed now to have resigned the more immediate charge of matters to a younger woman, probably a