Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/399

 So things passed away during three or four years, till a bilious fever, which carried off Mrs Thomas, exposed Cassy to new vicissitudes. She was no longer needed at Mount Flat, and in hopes to get back the large sum he had paid for her, Mr Thomas sent her off with her child to New Orleans to be sold.

Among the purchasers who there presented themselves was a Mr Curtis, as Cassy afterwards learnt, a native of Boston, and well connected there. Like many others from the same city, he had come to New Orleans while still quite young. Afterwards entering into business himself, and succeeding in it, instead of marrying, he had, as is customary enough with the northern adventurers in that city, fallen into the habits of the place, and formed a connection with a handsome, young, light-colored slave, whom he had purchased, and for whom he entertained so strong an affection as to have felt very seriously her recent death, leaving behind her a little daughter some three or four years younger than our boy Montgomery.

Being of a domestic disposition, and desirous of filling up this break in his household establishment, Mr Curtis, when his grief was a little assuaged, had become a visitant, with that view, of the slave warehouses; and Cassy having at once very decidedly struck his fancy, he made a purchase of her and of her child. I relate all this very coolly; but imagine, reader, if you can, how I must have felt, when, ignorant of the event, I first heard the story from Cassy's own lips!; arsed installed in the superintendence of Mr Curtis's household, which at this time was on a small and modest scale, and in the care of his little daughter, it was not long before Mr Curtis intimated to her, in a very delicate way, — for he was thoroughly amiable, and in every respect a gentleman, — his disposition to place the relation between them on a more intimate footing.;

He appeared a good deal surprised, contrasting, it is probable, Cassy's behavior with his former