Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/407

 examples; in fact, the boarders themselves were all up in arms, especially the women, — for the men did not seem to have so much objection to her, — threatening to leave if she were not turned out; and the poor girl might, perhaps, have been obliged to sleep in the street, had not a little milliner, to whom she had formerly shown some kindnesses, taken her home even at the risk of offending all her fashionable customers.

She wrote at once to Montgomery, at New York, who came on immediately to her assistance. Happening to meet Mr Agrippa Curtis in State Street, about the time of high change, he expressed to him, in pretty plain terms, his sense of his conduct. That gentleman — he passed for such in Boston, notwithstanding a prevailing rumor that the mercantile firm of Curtis, Sawin, Byrne, and Co., to which he belonged, had laid the foundation of their fortune by an underhand connection with the Brazilian slave trade — retorted, in great dudgeon, that he was not to be lectured by any cursed runaway nigger, the son of a a ; a polite allusion to Montgomery's descent, a circumstance with which Mr Grip Curtis had become well acquainted, in visits to his brother at New Orleans. Montgomery replied by knocking the scoundrel down on the spot; and one of the bystanders having the good nature to hand him a stick, — for Mr Agrippa Curtis, though highly respectable, was not very popular, — as the fellow rose up my boy proceeded to, give him a severe caning, to the great apparent satisfaction of at least half of the assembled merchants, some of whom made a ring around them, in order, as they said, to have fair play; perhaps, too, for the better chance of enjoying Mr Grip's capers and contortions, which, as Montgomery wrote to his mother, were highly ridiculous. }

Mr Agrippa Curtis immediately made a complaint at the Police Court, before which Montgomery was had up and fined twenty dollars. He also commenced a private suit, laying his damages at ten