womanhood, gliding about on her errands of mercy, could have imagined that the future had in store for her such a mingled cup of bitterness and strife. None probably had met with less to discipline the character up to the time of her marriage.
Another slave, about the age of Mr. Carleton, and—once a particular favorite of the family, though by no means the counterpart of the brunette, either in personal attractions or profligacy of character, deeply aggravated by a sense of the wrongs she had suffered, could not brook with indifference this new invasion of her own domain, nor the duplicity thus carried on before the eyes of the unsuspecting wife. By nature of a meek, inoffensive disposition, the degradation to which she had been forced roused all the spirit within her, and she assumed a tone of defiance toward all but Mrs. Carleton, in whose presence a habitual melancholy had always pervaded her features, exciting her curiosity to know something of her previous history, which, failing to learn from her husband, she resolved to gain from the slave herself. He divined this, either from his adroitness in reading the expression of the human countenance, or from mere conjecture, and forthwith established a system of surveillance which was rendered complete by introducing this young dave to be the constant companion of her mistress, thus rendering all interviews between her and the elder slave impossible. It was a source of no little discomfiture to the latter to be thus supplanted by the young brunette, not only for the loss of station she had lately enjoyed in being the first in her master's confidence, which she prized in spite of her contempt
