Le Grange consented, and when he went to the city again he told his wife he was going to sell the child.

“I am glad of it,” said Georgiette.  “I would have her mother sold, but we can’t spare her; she is so handy with her needle, and does all the cutting out on the place.”

Le Grange’s Plan

“The whole fact is this Joe, I am in an awkward fix.  I have got myself into a scrape, and I want you to help me out of it.  You were good at such things when we were at College, and I want you to try your hand again.”

“Well, what’s the difficulty now?”

“Well, it is rather a serious one.  I have got a child on my hands, and I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Whose child is it?”

“Now, that’s just where the difficulty lies.  It is the child of one of my girls, but it looks so much like me, that my wife don’t want it on the place.  I am too hard up just now to take the child and her mother, North, and take care of them there.  And to tell you the truth I am too humane to have the child sold here as a slave.  Now in a word do you think that among your Abolitionist friends in the North you could find any one who would raise the child and bring it up like a white child.”

“I don’t know about that St. Pierre.  There are a number of our people in the North, who do two things.  They hate slavery and hate negroes.  They feel like the woman who in writing to her husband said, they say (or don’t say) that absence conquers love; for the longer you stay away the better I love you.  But then I know some who, I believe, are really sincere, and who would do anything to help the colored people.  I think I know two or three families who would be willing to take the child, and do a good part by her.  If you say so, I will write to a friend whom I have now in mind, and if they will consent I will take the child with me when I go North, provided I can do it without having it discovered that she is colored, for it would put me in an awkward fix to have it known that I took a colored child away with me.”

“Oh, never fear,” said St. Pierre, slapping his friend on the shoulder.  “The child is whiter than you are, and you know you can pass for white.”

True to his promise, Josiah Collins wrote to a Quaker friend, whom he knew in Pennsylvania, and told him the particulars of the child’s history, and the wishes of her father, and the compensation he would give.  In a few days he received a favorable response in which the friend told him he was glad to have the privilege of rescuing one of that fated race from a doom more cruel than the grave; that the compensation was no object; that they had lost their only child, and hoped that she would in a measure fill the void in their hearts.

Highly gratified with the kind letter of the friend, Le Grange gave the child into the charge of Josiah Collins, and putting a check for five hundred dollars in his hand, parted with them at the [station].