Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/391

 give her away to an old black woman, the only black person any where in the neighborhood of the village in which she was born, who lived all alone by herself, in a little hut surrounded by woods, where she sold root beer in the summer time to the passers by, dealt in all sorts of herbs, as to which she was reported to be wondrous knowing, and had, besides, at least among the children, the reputation of being a witch.

The idea of going to live upon a plantation where she would have nobody about her hardly but black people did stagger her resolution a little; till Mr Thomas reassured her by suggesting how comfortable it was to own one's own servants, whom one could make do just as one pleased, and by the information that there were plenty of light-colored people among the slaves, and that she should have a maid of her own as near white as possible — a promise on the strength of which Cassy had been bought for her, as already mentioned.

The new Mrs Thomas had pictured to herself, as her destined future home, an elegant villa, splendidly furnished, surrounded with beautiful and fragrant tropical shrubbery, except the inevitable nuisance of the negroes, — to which she hoped to accustom herself in time, or for which she was willing to accept the orange blossoms as an antidote, — a perfect southern paradise. Mr Thomas, it is true, good easy man, had never promised her any thing of the sort; but as young ladies often will, she had taken it all for granted as a matter of course. Judge, then, of her disappointment, when, on reaching Mount Flat, — for that was the name which Mr Thomas had given to his plantation, determined, as he said, to stick to the truth, and yet not to be outdone by any of the Mount Pleasants, Monticellos, and other high-sounding names of the neighborhood, — judge of her surprise to find her expected villa in the shape of four log houses, connected together by a floored and covered passage, without carpets, paper-hangings, or even plaster, and with roofs so imperfect that in every heavy storm of