Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/404

 monthly allowance: He also, as Cassy understood, executed at the same time a deed of manumission of his little daughter Eliza, who still remained under Cassy's care, growing up a nice companion and playmate for our little Montgomery.

When the children arrived at the proper age, Mr Curtis had sent them to New England for an education; first Montgomery, and afterwards Eliza, who was sent on to the care of Mr Curtis's brother Agrippa, and placed by him, at Boston, in a select, fashionable, aristocratic female school.

Montgomery, having spent two or three years at a New England academy, had been afterwards placed in a counting house in New York, and had lately, through the patronage of his kind benefactor, been established there in a business for himself connected with the New Orleans trade.

Cassy's monthly allowance in the way of wages having, in the course of years, and with the addition of interest, which Mr Curtis scrupulously allowed her, accumulated to a considerable sum, he had lately invested it for her in the purchase of a small house and garden, in the suburbs of the city, to which — as Mr Curtis contemplated travelling at the north and in Europe for his health — she had some time before removed.

Every thing thus, she said, had gone well with her, as if she had been a chosen favorite of Providence; except, indeed, the long-deferred fulfilment of her still.cherished hope of again finding me. But this long course of singular prosperity had at length been suddenly and most frightfully overcast.

News came that Mr Curtis, while on his way to Boston, in ascending the Ohio River, had been seriously injured by the bursting of a boiler; and this was followed, not long after, by information of his death. When this occurred, which was only a few weeks previous, Montgomery was employed in his business at New York, and Eliza was still at school at Boston. She was a beautiful and elegant girl; her liquid dark