Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/364

 was something in his straightforward, downright way of looking at things, as well as in his lively conversation and agreeable manners, which, rather pleased me.:

I therefore proceeded to make a return of his confidence, at which he seemed to be a good deal flattered. Complimenting his sagacity, I admitted my intimacy with a female slave, many years ago, whom, from his description of her, and the circumstances he had mentioned, I believed to be the very one whom McGrab had purchased in North Carolina, and whom he had sold to the Mississippi planter; and I added, that I believed her boy to be my child. What was the name of the planter, and could he aid me any further in finding them out?

"And suppose you find them," he asked, "what do you intend to do?"

"Buy them," I answered, "if I can, and set them free."

"Better think twice," he replied, "before you set out on any such adventure. Time, you know, makes changes. You can't expect to get back the young girl you left in North Carolina. O, the deceitful baggage! Didn't she tell me, with tears streaming down those great black eyes of hers, and such an air of truth that I couldn't help believing her, that she had a husband, the only man she had ever known any thing about, who was the father of her child, and who had been carried off by the slave traders a year or two before, and whom she expected yet to meet, by some good providence, some where in the south! Don't flatter yourself with the idea of any constancy to you. Even had she wished it, it could hardly have been in her power. Like as not you will' find her, if at all, grown as plump as a beer barrel, housekeeper, and something else besides, to her master; or may be, by this time, cook or washerwoman, and the mother, as Gouge said she might be, of a dozen additional children, and perhaps with an agreeable variety of complexions; though, for that matter,