Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/352

332 That was the name we had given to our boy, out of compliment to Cassy's kind mistress; and I no longer doubted that it was of my wife and my child that he spoke.





my emotion as well as I could, I begged Colter to go on with his story. But this he was in no hurry to do.

"You seem," he said, eyeing me closely, "to have some more than ordinary interest in this affair. You mentioned, I recollect, this not being your first visit to America, but that you had formerly travelled here, some twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, you must have been a young man, and young men are easily captivated; and you young Englishmen, when you get among us, notwithstanding all we hear about English virtue and decorum, are no more anchorites than the rest of us. But even the chaste Joseph, or Scipio, or the pope of Rome himself might readily be pardoned for melting a little before such attractions. There is a soft, winning, captivating way about some of those girls that makes them perfectly resistible. I don't wonder at the envy, rage, and jealousy of our white women. They can't help being conscious of their own inferiority in these respects. Of course, it makes them cross and fractious — natural enough; but that does not help the matter, nor render them any the more agreeable. So they have to be content with being mistresses of the house and the servants, while some slave girl, black, yellow, or white, as the case may be, is mistress of their husbands' affections,

"There are a good many of these girls whom it is quite enough to spoil the temper of the best-natured woman in the world to have in the house with them.

"As to this Cassy, in whom you seem to take such