Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/358

 "I soon found that her most immediate and pressing source of suffering was the apprehension lest she might be separated from her boy; and indeed there was some occasion for it. A New Orleans trader, with whom we often dealt, had evinced a great disposition to buy her. After a careful examination of her person, taking more liberties than I shall care to mention to you, he pronounced her a prime wench, a first-rate article, A, number one, extremely well adapted to the New Orleans market; and he offered to-pay two thousand dollars for her, cash, which Gouge agreed to take, provided he would give an additional hundred dollars for the boy. But the trader. did not want the boy, who would only be a drawback upon the value of the woman when he came to sell her; at least so he pretended, and he insisted that the boy ought to be thrown into the bargain. A lady of Augusta, in search of a small boy to bring up as body servant to her infant son, offered to give seventy-five dollars for him. The chance seemed to be that the boy would be sold to the Augusta woman, and the mother to the New Orleans trader. Aware of this, in the greatest distress she appealed to me to save her from this separation. It so happened that during Gouge's absence at a sheriff's sale some ten miles in the country, where he thought some bargains might be picked up, a lady and gentleman called at the pen in search of a female attendant for the lady. The gentleman was a Mississippi planter, resident somewhere in the neighborhood of Vicksburg, returning home with his new wife, whom he had lately married at the north. I pointed out this Cassy to their notice, and she besieged them with pressing entreaties, making the little boy kneel, and put his tiny hands together, and pray first the lady and then the gentleman to buy him and his mother, and not to let the New Orleans trader take his mother away from him.:

"The lady, after due inquiries of Cassy as to her accomplishments and capabilities, declared her to be