Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/361

 temper, which I had not then learned so well how to command, that we soon got into a violent quarrel, which ended in my giving him a caning on the spot, and of course in the breaking up of the partnership.

"I was, indeed, quite too soft for that business. As to the men, I should have done well enough with them; but the women, old and young, were always getting up such scenes, and were always so full of complaints about being separated from their daughters, and their mothers, and their babies, and their husbands, that to a man who had the least of a tender spot in his heart, it was perfectly intolerable.

"Thus ousted from the slave trading business, it became necessary for me to find some other occupation; but that was not so easy. The occupations that a southern gentleman can adopt without degradation, are very few indeed. My manners, address, the good songs I could sing, and good stories I could tell, had made me rather a favorite in society; and as I never drank, and understood a thing or two about cards and dice, billiards and faro tables, I was able to replenish my pockets in that way; and finally, for want of a better, that became my regular profession."

"And," said I, wishing to pay him off a little for his late tantalizings, "is this one of those few occupations which a southern gentleman can adopt without degradation?"

"The gentility of gambling can't be denied," he said, "since it is very freely practised by the larger part of southern gentlemen. Once in a while the legislatures are seized with a fit of penitence or virtue, and pass laws to break it up; but nobody ever thinks of paying any attention to those laws, or attempting to enforce them, except, now and then, some poor plucked pigeon, who undertakes to revenge himself in that way. But though gambling is just as genteel as slaveholding, some how or other, by an inconsistency like that in the case of the slave traders, we who make a profession of it, though we associate constantly with gentlemen, are not, I must confess,