Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/344

 held up their heads; they had had their opinions, and pretty positive ones too; nor had they been at all slow or modest in asserting them. To-day they seemed quite sunk into nobodies, the stiffening all taken out of them, moody and silent, with nothing to say about any thing, eyeing the person to whom their money had been transferred, and to whom, the day before, they had paid such court as a rich planter, with a singular mixture of dislike and terror, much like that with which I had often seen an unfortunate slave eye a master whom he feared and hated, but from whom he felt it impossible to escape.

Indeed, I could not but think, that strip those two northern gentlemen of their fine clothes, and set them up in their present crestfallen and disconsolate condition on the auction block of Messrs Gouge and McGrab, or some other slave dealers, especially with the cool, keen eye of their late depredator upon them, and they might very easily have passed muster, as two "white niggers," born and bred in servitude, and stupid fellows at that, easily to be kept in order, and from whom very little mischief or trouble need be apprehended.

Finding these two disconsolate individuals sad, solemn, and as dry as a squeezed lemon, and quite insensible to all his efforts to amuse them, the gambler, whose victims they had become, directed his conversation to me. I cannot say but that I decidedly enjoyed their predicament. "O, my fine fellows," said I to myself, "you now have a little experience what a nice thing it is, this being stripped and plundered! You think it mighty hard to part with a few hundred dollars, the earnings, by means I don't know how particularly honest, of perhaps only a few weeks — money lost, too, not less by your own consenting folly, than by the skill and tricks of a man more knowing and adroit than yourselves. Now learn to sympathize a little. with multitudes of poor fellows in natural gifts and endowments not so very much, if at all, your inferiors — some of them, indeed, vastly