“You are Abolitionists, I ’spose?” asked Phillis.

“We are,” they said, “and we will help you off.”

“I want none of your help,” said Phillis.  “My husband and children are at home; but if they wasn’t, I am an honest woman, and am not in the habit of taking any thing.  I’ll never take my freedom.  If my master would give it to me, and the rest of us, I should be thankful.  I am not going to begin stealing, and I fifty years of age.”

An eye-witness described the straightening of her tall figure, and the indignant flashing of her eye, also the discomfited looks of her northern friends.

I have somewhere read of a fable of Iceland.  According to it, lost souls are to be parched in the burning heat of Hecla, and then cast for ever to cool in its never-thawing snows.  Although Phillis could not have quoted this, her opinions would have applied it.  For some reason, it was evident to her mind (for she had been well instructed in the Bible) that slavery was from the first ordained as a curse.  It might, to her high spirit, have been like burning in the bosom of Hecla; but taking refuge among Abolitionists was, from the many instances that had come to her knowledge, like cooling in its never-thawing snows.

At the time that we introduced her to the reader, she was the mother of twelve children.  Some were quite young, but a number of them were grown, and all of them, with the exception of one, (the namesake of his father,) inherited their mother’s energy of character.  She had accustomed them to constant industry, and unqualified obedience to her directions; and for this reason, no one had found it necessary to interfere in their management.

Pride was a large ingredient in Phillis’s composition.  Although her husband presented one of the blackest visages the sun ever shone upon, Phillis appeared to hold in small esteem the ordinary servants on the plantation.  She was constantly chiding her children for using their expressions, and tried to keep them in the house with white people as much as possible, that they might acquire good manners.  It was quite a grief to her that Bacchus had not a more genteel dialect than the one he used.  She had a great deal of family pride; there was a difference in her mind between family servants and those employed in field labor.  For “the quality” she had the highest respect; for “poor white people” only a feeling of pity.  She had some noble qualities, and some great weaknesses; but as a slave! we present her to the reader, and she must be viewed as such.

Miss Janet was, in her eyes, perfection.  Her children were all the better for her kind instructions.  Her youngest child, Lydia, a girl of six or seven years old, followed the old lady everywhere, carrying her key and knitting-basket, looking for her spectacles, and maintaining short conversations in a confidential tone.