“Is that your gratitude,” was the indignant reply, “for all that we’ve done for you?  The idea of a nigger wanting over four dollars a month, when you’ve been working all your life, too, for nothing at all.  Why everybody in town is wondering that I keep you, when white help is so much better.”

“But, ma’am,” replied Susan, “they tell me here that a woman gets six dollars a month, when she does the whole work of a family.”

“A white woman does,” said this Abolitionist lady, “but not a nigger, I guess.  Besides, if they do, you ought to be willing to work cheaper for Abolitionists, for they are your friends.”

If “save me from my friends,” had been in Lalla Rookh, Susan would certainly have applied it, but as the quotation belonged to the heroic rather than the sentimental department, she could not avail herself of it, and therefore went on chopping her codfish and onions together, at the rate of four dollars a month, and very weak eyes, till some good wind blew Captain Moore to the command of his company, in the Fort near the town.

After Mrs. Moore’s housekeeping operations had fairly commenced, she found it would be necessary to have a person to clean the house of four rooms, and to help Neptune mind the baby.  Aunt Polly accordingly set forward on an exploration.  She presented quite an unusual appearance as regards her style of dress.  She wore a plaid domestic gingham gown; she had several stuff ones, but she declared she never put one of them on for any thing less than “meetin.”  She had a black satin Methodist bonnet, very much the shape of a coal hod, and the color of her own complexion, only there was a slight shade of blue in it.  Thick gloves, and shoes, and stockings; a white cotton apron, and a tremendous blanket shawl completed her costume.  She had a most determined expression of countenance; the fact is, she had gone out to get a house-servant, and she didn’t intend to return without one.

I forgot to mention that she walked with a cane, having had a severe attack of rheumatics since her arrival in “the great Norrurd,” and at every step she hit the pavements in such a manner as to startle the rising generation of Abolitionists, and it had the good effect of preventing any of them from calling out to her, “Where did you get your face painted, you black nigger, you?” which would otherwise have occurred.

Susan was just returning from a grocery store with three codfish in one hand, and a piece of salt pork and a jug of molasses in the other, when she was startled by Aunt Polly’s unexpected appearance, bearing down upon her like a man of war.

Aunt Polly stopped for a moment and looked at her intensely, while Susan’s feelings, which, like her poetry, had for some time been quite subdued by constant collision with a cooking stove, got the better of her, and she burst into tears.  Aunt Polly made up her mind on the spot; it was, as she afterwards expressed it, “‘A meracle,’ meeting that poor girl, with all that codfish and other stuff in her hand.”