They owned a large farm, but left it wholly unimproved; attending
mainly to their vocations of fishing and inn-keeping. Isabella
declares she can ill describe the kind of life she led with them. It
was a wild, out-of-door kind of lief. She was expected to carry fish,
to hoe corn, to bring roots and herbs from the woods for beers, go to
the Strand for a gallon of molasses or liquor as the case might
require, and 'browse around,' as she expresses it. It was a life that
suited her well for the time-being as devoid of hardship or terror as
it was of improvement; a need which had not yet become a want. Instead
of improving at this place, morally, she retrograded, as their example
taught her to curse; and it was here that she took her first oath.
After living with them for about a year and a half, she was sold to one
John J. Dumont, for the sum of seventy pounds. This was in 1810. Mr.
Dumont lived in the same county as her former masters, in the town of
New Paltz, and she remained with him till a short time previous to her
emancipation by the State, in 1828.




HER STANDING WITH HER NEW MASTER AND MISTRESS.


Had Mrs. Dumont possessed that vein of kindness and consideration for
the slaves, so perceptible in her husband's character, Isabella would
have been as comfortable here, as one had best be, if one must be a
slave. Mr. Dumont had been nursed in the very lap of slavery, and
being naturally a man of kind feelings, treated his slaves with all the
consideration he did his other animals, and more, perhaps. But Mrs.