The African Trader | Page 2

receive the usual happy greetings from my

father and sisters. My spirits sank when looking up at the windows, I
saw that all the blinds were drawn down. I knocked at the door with
trembling hand. A strange and rough-looking man opened it. "Is my
father at home?" I asked, in a low voice. The man hesitated, looking
hard at me, and then said, "Yes; but you can't see him. There are some
ladies upstairs--your sisters, I suppose--you had better go to them."
There was an ominous silence in the house; no one was moving about.
What had become of all the servants? I stole gently up to Jane and
Mary's boudoir. They, and little Emily our younger sister, were seated
together, all dressed in black. Sobs burst from them, as they threw their
arms round my neck, without uttering a word. I then knew to a
certainty what had happened--our kind father was dead; but I little
conceived the sad misfortunes which had previously overtaken him and
broken his heart, leaving his children utterly destitute.
Jane, on recovering herself, in a gentle sad voice told me all about it.
"Mary and I intend going out as governesses, but we scarcely know
what to do for dear Emily and you Harry, though we will devote our
salaries to keep you and her at school."
"Oh, I surely can get a place as a nursemaid," said Emily, a fair delicate
girl, looking but ill-adapted for the situation she proposed for herself.
"And I, Jane, will certainly not deprive you and Mary of your
hard-earned salaries, even were you to obtain what would be required,"
I answered, firmly. "I ought rather to support you, and I hope to be able
to do so by some means or other."
My sisters even then were not aware of the sad position in which we
were placed. Our father had been a man of peculiarly reserved and
retiring manners; he had formed no friendships in England, and the few
people he knew were simply business acquaintances. An execution had
been put into the house even before his death, so that we had no power
over a single article it contained.
The servants, with the exception of my sisters' black nurse, had gone
away, and we had not a friend whose hospitality we could claim. She,
good creature (Mammy, as we called her), finding out, on seeing my

trunk in the hall, that I had arrived, came breathless, from hurrying up
stairs, into the room, and embracing me, kissed my forehead and
cheeks as if I had still been a little child; and I felt the big drops fall
from her eyes as she held me in her shrivelled arms. "Sad all this,
Massa Harry, but we got good Fader up dere, and He take care of us
though He call massa away," and she cast her eyes to heaven, trusting
with a simple firm faith to receive from thence that protection she
might have justly feared she was not likely to obtain on earth.
"We all have our sorrows, dear children," she continued, "massa had
many sorrows when he lose your mother and his fortune, and I have my
sorrows when I was carried away by slaver people, and leave my
husband and piccaniny in Africa, and now your sorrows come. But we
can pray to the good God, and he lift us out of dem all."
Mammy had often told us of the cruel way in which she had been
kidnapped, and how her husband had escaped with her little boy; and
after she became a Christian (and a very sincere one she was), her great
grief arose from supposing that her child would be brought up as a
savage heathen in ignorance of the blessed truths of the gospel. My
sisters and I, as children, had often wept while she recounted her sad
history, but at the time I speak of, I myself was little able to appreciate
the deeper cause of her sorrow. I thought, of course, that it was very
natural she should grieve for the loss of her son, but I did not
understand that it arose on account of her anxiety for his soul's
salvation.
"I pray day and night," I heard her once tell Jane, "dat my piccaniny
learn to know Christ, and I sure God hear my prayers. How He bring it
about I cannot tell."
We and Mammy followed our father to the grave, and were then
compelled to quit the house, leaving everything behind us, with the
exception of my sisters' wardrobes and a few ornaments, which they
claimed as their property. Mammy did her best to cheer us. She had
taken, unknown to my sisters, some humble, though clean, lodgings in
the outskirts of the town,