There was but one other servant in the house, a middle-aged woman, who had run away from her mistress in Boston; or rather, she had been seduced off by the Abolitionists.  While many would have done well under the circumstances, Susan had never been happy, or comfortable, since this occurred.  Besides the self-reproach that annoyed her, (for she had been brought on from Georgia to nurse a sick child, and its mother, a very feeble person, had placed her dependence upon her,) Susan was illy calculated to shift for herself.  She was a timid, delicate woman, with rather a romantic cast of mind; her mistress had always been an invalid, and was fond of hearing her favorite books read aloud.  For the style of books that Susan had been accustomed to listen to, as she sat at her sewing, Lalla Rookh would be a good specimen; and, as she had never been put to hard work, but had merely been an attendant about her mistress’ room, most of her time was occupied in a literary way.  Thus, having an excellent memory, her head was a sort of store-room for lovesick snatches of song.  The Museum men would represent her as having snatched a feather of the bird of song; but as this is a matter-of-fact kind of story, we will observe, that Susan not being naturally very strong-minded, and her education not more advanced than to enable her to spell out an antiquated valentine, or to write a letter with a great many small i’s in it, she is rather to be considered the victim of circumstances and a soft heart.  She was, nevertheless, a conscientious woman; and when she left Georgia, to come North, had any one told her that she would run away, she would have answered in the spirit, if not the expression, of the oft quoted, “Is thy servant a dog?”

She enjoyed the journey to the North, the more that the little baby improved very much in strength; she had had, at her own wish, the entire charge of him from his birth.

The family had not been two days at the Revere House before Susan found herself an object of interest to men who were gentlemen, if broadcloth and patent-leather boots could constitute that valuable article.  These individuals seemed to know as much of her as she did of herself, though they plied her with questions to a degree that quite disarranged her usual calm and poetic flow of ideas.  As to “Whether she had been born a slave, or had been kidnapped?  Whether she had ever been sold?  How many times a week she had been whipped, and what with?  Had she ever been shut up in a dark cellar and nearly starved?  Was she allowed more than one meal a day?  Did she ever have any thing but sweet potato pealings?  Had she ever been ducked?  And, finally, she was desired to open her mouth, that they might see whether her teeth had been extracted to sell to the dentist?”

Poor Susan! after one or two interviews her feelings were terribly agitated; all these horrible suggestions might become realities, and though she loved her home, her mistress, and the baby too, yet she was finally convinced that though born a slave, it was not the intention of Providence, but a mistake, and that she had been miraculously led to this Western Holy Land, of which Boston is the Jerusalem, as the means by which things could be set to rights again.