Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/32

 They respected the profound depth of my grief, and for a week or two, I was suffered to weep on unmolested. My feelings were no longer of that acute and piercing kind which I have described in the preceding chapter. The temperament of the mind is forever changing. That~state of preternatural sensibility, of which I have attempted to give an idea, had disappeared when my attention became wholly occupied in the care of my dying master. It was succeeded by a dull and stupid sorrow. Apparently I now had increased cause for agitation and alarm. That which I then dreaded, had happened. My young master, upon whom all my hopes were suspended, lived no longer, and I knew not what was to become of me. But the fit of fear and anxious anticipation was over; and I now waited my fate with a sort of stupid and careless indifference.

Though not called upon to do it, I continued as usual to wait upon my master's table. For several days, I took my place instinctively near where master James's chair ought to have stood; till the sight of the vacant place drove me in tears to the opposite corner. In the mean time, nobody called upon me to do anything, or seemed to notice that I was present. Even master William made an effort to repress his habitual insolence.

But this could not last long. Indeed it was a stretch of indulgence, which no 6ne but a favorite servant could have expected; since slaves, in general, are thought to have no business to be sorry — if it makes them unable to work.

One morning after breakfast, master William having discussed his toast and coffee, began by telling his father, that in his opinion, the servants at Spring-Meadow, were a great deal too indulgently treated. He was by this time, a smart, dashing, elegant young man, having returned upwards of a year before, from college, and quite lately, from Charleston, in South Carolina, whither he had been to spend a winter, and as his father expressed it, to wear off the rusticity of the school-room. It was there perhaps, that he had learned the new precepts of humanity, which he was now preaching. He declared that any tenderness towards a servant only tended to make him insolent and discontented, and was quite thrown away on the ungrateful rascals. Then,