adfastly for the first time, and with the most
intense emotion: but it was pity. I had been sufficiently long in the
West Indies to know exactly the relation in which she stood to her
father. However, he went on to relate how she had been born to him by a
beautiful mulatto, for whom he had given a great sum; yet at this she
startled not, moved not, blushed not. But hers was not the calmness of
obduracy, but of innocence.

Strongly did I commiserate her, and gently strove to draw her into
discourse. I found her ignorant, oh! how profoundly ignorant! She had
no ideas beyond the estate in which she lived, and those that she had
gathered from the gang of negroes that worked it. Her father had taught
her nothing but to play a few tunes by ear upon the guitar, and sing
some old French songs. Yet she had been accustomed to all the
observances of a lady--had slaves to wait upon her, and was always
elaborately, sometimes richly, dressed. Isolated as she had been, I
soon discovered that she was a compound of enthusiasm, talent, and
melancholy. She was little more than fifteen years old, yet that age,
in those tropical climates, answers fully to a European one-and-twenty.
In form, she was a perfect woman, light, rounded, and extremely active;
all her motions were as graceful, and as undulating as the
gently-swelling billow. If she moved quickly, she bounded; if slowly,
she appeared to glide on effortless through space. She had taken her
lessons of grace in the woods, and her gymnasium had been among the
sportive billows of the ocean. It is but of little use me describing
her face; for everyone supposes that, in these affairs, the author draws
at once, as largely as he can, upon his own imagination, and as he
dares, upon the credulity of his readers. Though a slave, she had but
little of the black blood in her--in her complexion none. She was not
fair, but her skin was very transparent, very pure, and of a dazzling
and creamy sort of whiteness. I have seen something like it on the
delicate Chinese paintings of the secluded ladies of that very secluded
empire, and should imagine it just such a permanent tint as the Roman
empress strove to procure by bathing every day in milk. Colour she had
none, and thrilling must have been the emotions that could call it into
her placid and pensive cheeks. Her features were not _chiselled_, and
had any sculptor striven to imitate them on the purest marble, he would
have discovered