Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/389

 O, tie of love, and natural bond of marriage, union of hearts, which laws and _ priestly benedictions may sanction if they choose, but cannot make; so neither can time, nor separation, nor prosperity, nor suffering, nor all that unbridled power may inflict, or helplessness submit to, nor aught save death, nor death itself, undo thee!





new mistress — into whose hands, by the humane interference of Mr Colter, Cassy had passed from the slave pen of those pious and respectable gentlemen, Gouge and McGrab — was, as I knew already, from Colter's account of the matter, the newly-married New England wife of Mr. Thomas, a Mississippi cotton planter.

Born on a little New Hampshire farm, the child of poor parents, but, like so many other New England girls, anxious to.do something for herself, the new Mrs ‘Thomas, when she first became acquainted with her future husband, had been employed as one of the teachers at a fashionable boarding school, at which he had placed, for their education, two young daughters of his by a former wife.

The current idea in New England of a southern cotton planter is very much that which prevails, or used to prevail, in Great Britain of a West Indian. He is imagined to be a fine, bold, dashing young fellow, elegant and accomplished, amiable and charming, with plenty of money, and nothing to do but to amuse himself and his friends — an idea formed from a few specimens to be seen at watering-places, who, for the sake of dashing away for a few weeks at the north, run after by all the young women, and old ones too, with marriageable daughters on their hands, and stared at by all the greenhorns — are willing to starve,