The tenderly-nurtured daughter of the wealthy planter remained in
this miserable place two days. The jailer, touched by her beauty and
extreme dejection, offered her better food than had been prescribed
in his orders. She thanked him, but said she could not eat. When he
invited her to occupy, for the night, a small room apart from the
herd of prisoners, she accepted the offer with gratitude. But she
could not sleep, and she dared not undress. In the morning, the
jailer, afraid of being detected in these acts of indulgence, told
her, apologetically, that he was obliged to request her to return to
the common apartment.

Having recovered somewhat from the stunning effects of the blow that
had fallen on her, she began to take more notice of her companions.
A gang of slaves, just sold, was in keeping there, till it suited
the trader's convenience to take them to New Orleans; and the
parting scenes she witnessed that day made an impression she never
forgot. "Can it be," she said to herself, "that such things have
been going on around me all these years, and I so unconscious of them?
What should I now be, if Alfred had not taken compassion on me, and
prevented my being sent to the New Orleans market, before I was ten
years old?" She thought with a shudder of the auction-scene the day
before, and began to be afraid that her friends could not save her
from that vile man's power.

She was roused from her reverie by the entrance of a white gentleman,
whom she had never seen before. He came to inspect the trader's gang
of slaves, to see if any one among them would suit him for a
house-servant; and before long, he agreed to purchase a
bright-looking mulatto lad. He stopped before Loo Loo, and said,
"Are you a good sempstress?"