To behold five or six tables in the saloon of a steamer, with half
a dozen men playing cards at each, with money, pistols, and
bowie-knives spread in splendid confusion before them, is an
ordinary thing on the Mississippi River.
CHAPTER V
THE YOUNG MOTHER.
On the fourth morning, the Patriot landed at Grand Gulf, a
beautiful town on the left bank of the Mississippi. Among the
numerous passengers who came on board at Rodney was another
slave-trader, with nine human chattels which he was conveying to
the Southern market. The passengers, both ladies and gentlemen,
were startled at seeing among the new lot of slaves a woman so
white as not to be distinguishable from the other white women on
board. She had in her arms a child so white that no one would
suppose a drop of African blood flowed through its blue veins.
No one could behold that mother with her helpless babe, without
feeling that God would punish the oppressor. There she sat, with
an expressive and intellectual forehead, and a countenance full of
dignity and heroism, her dark golden locks rolled back from her
almost snow-white forehead and floating over her swelling bosom.
The tears that stood in her mild blue eyes showed that she was
brooding over sorrows and wrongs that filled her bleeding heart.
The hearts of the passers-by grew softer, while gazing upon that
young mother as she pressed sweet kisses on the sad, smiling lips
of the infant that lay in her lap. The small, dimpled hands of the
innocent creature were slyly hid in the warm bosom on which the
little one nestled.
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