“She resolved to remain in this condition no longer, and escaped to Savannah with a young man whose acquaintance she had made at the house in Mercer street.  For a time they lived at a respectable hotel, as husband and wife.  But her antecedents got out, and they got notice to leave.  The same fate met them in Charleston, to which city they removed.  Her antecedents seemed to follow her wherever she went, like haunting spirits seeking her betrayal.  She was homeless; and without a home there was nothing open to her but that vortex of licentiousness the world seemed pointing her to.  Back she went to the house in Mercer street-was glad to get back; was at least free from the finger of scorn.  Henceforward she associated with various friends, who sought her because of her transcendent charms.  She had cultivated a natural intelligence, and her manners were such as might have become one in better society.  But her heart’s desire was to leave the house.  I took her from it; and for a time I was happy to find that the contaminating weeds of vice had not overgrown the more sensitive buds of virtue.

“I provided a small tenement in Centre street, such as my means would afford, and we started in the world, resolved to live respectably.  But what had maintained me respectably was now found inadequate to the support of us both.  Life in a house of sumptuous vice had rendered Anna incapable of adapting herself to the extreme of economy now forced upon us.  Anna was taken sick; I was compelled to neglect my work, and was discharged.  Discontent, embarrassment, and poverty resulted.  I struggled to live for six months; but my prospects, my hopes of gaining an honest living, were gone.  I had no money to join the society, and the trade being dull, could get nothing to do.  Fate seemed driving us to the last stage of distress.  One by one our few pieces of furniture, our clothing, and the few bits of jewelry Anna had presented her at the house in Mercer street, found their way to the sign of the Three Martyrs.  The man of the eagle face would always lend something on them, and that something relieved us for the time.  I many times thought, as I passed the house of the Foreign Missions in Centre street, where there was such an air of comfort, that if Mrs. Abijah Slocum, and the good-natured man who sat in the chair, and the wise little man in the spectacles, would condescend to look in at our little place, and instead of always talking about getting Mr. Singleton Spyke off to Antioch, take pity on our destitution, what a relief it would be.  It would have made more hearts happy than Mr. Spyke, notwithstanding the high end of his mission, could have softened in ten years at Antioch.