Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/347

 any, his character for profusion and extravagance being too well established for any of his father's old friends to be willing to trust him. Indeed, since the estate had turned out insolvent, it was curious to remark, notwithstanding his father's numerous acquaintance, and the ostentatious hospitality with which for so many years he had kept open doors, how very few friends the family had.

Being a good scholar, he might have found occupation as tutor in some family; but this was looked upon as a servile position, incompatible with the dignity of a southerner, and only fit to be filled by fellows from the north. "The Romans, you know," — so he remarked to me, — "intrusted the education of their children to slave pedagogues; we generally get ours from New England." As to going into mercantile business, that would require capital; and that business, too, was mostly engrossed by adventurers from the north, who generally procured their clerks and assistants from the same quarter.

At length, unable to do any better, he had obtained employment from the rich slave trading firm of Gouge and McGrab, rising presently to be their first clerk and bookkeeper, and being finally admitted as a partner.

But this kind of business he had found objectionable on several accounts. In the first place, it was, not considered respectable, though on what grounds he was puzzled to tell. He could well understand how I, an Englishman, and even how oné of those Yankee fellows, — if it were possible to find one, which might be doubted, with courage enough to say that his soul was his own, — might find something objectionable in this business of trading in human muscles and sinews, buying and selling men, women, and children, at auction or otherwise. Tor himself, he did not pretend to any great piety or morality; he left that to the other members of the firm. McGrab was not actually a Methodist, but his wife and children were devoutly so, and as the old man himself