Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/393

 gave a good deal of a shock to her New England ideas, among the black children whom she found running and romping in front of the house at the moment of her arrival — the whole group having, in fact, assembled.to welcome home master and the new mistress — were quite a number of boys and girls eight or ten years old, naked as they were born, or with only some fragment of a tattered and filthy shirt hanging about them, [sic]begrimmed with dirt, and shouting and chattering, as she said to Cassy, like so many imps of the evil one himself.

But within the house a still more disagreeable reception awaited her. She found the keys and the general direction of affairs under the management of a tall, portly, middle-aged black woman, commonly called aunt Emma, of formidable size and strength, who, having been a favorite upper servant, and sort of prime minister, of the late Mrs Thomas, had succeeded, on her death, to the general control of the household. In the kitchen ruled supreme aunt Dinah, another big black woman, whose face plainly enough betrayed the irritability of her temper, stimulated from time to time by pretty free draughts of whiskey. It is not necessary to mention the other servants, who were in complete subordination to those two, but all of whom, with aunts Emma and Dinah at their head, it soon appeared, were parties to a conspiracy to set at nought the authority of the new Mrs Thomas, and to make her a mere cipher in her own house.

By some means or other, probably from one of Mr Thomas's daughters, whom the new-married pair had brought home with them, they soon got hold of the information that the new mistress was nothing but the daughter of a poor man, who worked for his living with his own hands, and herself only a poor schoolma'am; nor could a contempt more sovereign of such humble, plebeian, pitiful origin be evinced by the daintiest female aristocrat that ever wore white kid slippers, than by the black housekeeper and the black coals,