Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/359

 just the person she wanted. She had been bred up at the north, did not like niggers, and could not bear to have a black wench about her; whereas this one, she said, was as nice and as white, almost, as a New England girl, and the boy might soon be taught to clean the knives, wait at table, and make himself otherwise useful.

"I offered to take, for the two, two thousand and fifty dollars — a price which the husband thought enormous. He could buy three first-rate field hands for that. Somebody that was not quite so young and good looking would answer his wife's purpose just as well, and might, perhaps, too, be a safer bargain all round — an intimation clear enough to me, but which the wife did not seem to understand. She still insisted upon buying Cassy; and being yet in the honeymoon, she carried the day; and the bill of sale was signed, the money paid, and the mother and child-delivered to their new owners just as Gouge rode up to the pen.

"When the hard-hearted old rascal found out that I had sold the mother and child together for twenty-five dollars less than he could have got by selling them separately, you can't imagine what a fuss he made. This pious Baptist church member, who had been mistaken in New York, as I have told you, for a Doctor of Divinity, thrown quite off his balance, cursed and swore like a pirate. If I had fairly given them away he would not have been more abusive. I should have thought that for the moment at least he had fallen from grace, only that was no part of his creed. He was no Methodist; he and McGrab used to have warm disputes sometimes on that head. McGrab thought that even the best man might sometimes fall away; but Gouge insisted very positively upon the perseverance of the saints, of whom he did not doubt himself to be one.

"I dwelt upon the hardship of separating the mother and her child, and told Gouge he ought to be satisfied, as we made a handsome profit on the