Western Travel (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1838 edition. Excerpt: ...sensitive of children. As she stood at the corner of the dinner-table to fan away the flies, she was a picture from which it was difficult to turn away. Her little yellow headdress suited well with her clear brown complexion and large soft black eyes: nothing that she could at all understand of the conversation escaped her, while she never intermitted her waving of the huge brush of peacocks' feathers. Her face was then composed in its intelligence, for she stood by her mistress's elbow; a station where she seemed to think no harm could befal her. Alas she has lost her kind mistress. Amidst the many sad thoughts which thronged into my mind when I heard of the death of this lady, one of the wisest and best of American women, I own that some of my earliest regrets were for little Ailsie; and when I think of her sensibility, her beauty, and the dreadful circumstances of her parentage, as told me by her mistress, I am almost in despair about her future lot; for what can her master, with all his goodness, do for the forlorn little creature's protection? None but a virtuous mistress can fully protect a female slave, --and that too seldom. Ailsie was born on an estate in Tennessee. Her father is a white gentleman, not belonging to the family; her mother the family cook. The cook's black husband cherished such a deadly hatred against this poor child, as to be for ever threatening her life; and she was thought to be in such danger from his axe, that she was sent down the river to be taken into the family where I saw her. What a cruel world, --what a hard human life, must Ailsie find that she is born into Such facts, occurring at every step, put the stranger on the watch for every revelation of the feelings of the masters about the relation of the two...