Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/395

 Missis might be content to manage those servants she had brought in herself. She had brought in one, to be sure, though, according to all accounts, poor dear Massa Thomas had to buy her with his own money, and to pay a pretty round price too. But what right had she to come in and undertake to domineer over old mistress's servants? And here aunt Emma burst out into a loud laugh, partly in defiance, and partly in derision, at being called upon to give up the keys by such a poverty-stricken Yankee interloper; — she, — so she wound up, folding her arms, and drawing herself up to her full height, exactly as the late Mrs Thomas used to do, — she who had been raised in one of the first families i Virginia! But aunt Emma soon sunk down from this high pitch, subsiding into a flood of tears at the thought, as she expressed it, of what poor dear, dead mistress would say, she, born in one of the first families of Virginia, who hated a Yankee as she did a toad or a snake, always speaking of them as in fact no better than a set of free niggers, — an opinion in which aunt Emma seemed very cordially to join, — to come back, and find her turned out, and the keys in the hands of a Yankee!

There is nothing like a strong will, and by virtue of it the slave may sometimes usurp the place of the master. The new Mrs Thomas made grievous complaints to her husband, insisting that aunt Emma should be whipped and sent into the field. But the good-natured, easy old gentleman was so accustomed to be himself managed by her, and so tickled at the idea of aunt Emma's contempt for the Yankees, which he himself more than half shared, that he showed a strong disposition to take her part; nor was it till after a six months' struggle, and a long series of curtain lectures, in which particular the wife had the advantage of the housekeeper, that she finally succeeded in getting possession of the keys, and aunt Emma fairly out of the house. She insisted very strenuously upon having her sent down