“Little Hester will cry when she comes home and finds that I am gone. Can you do nothing for poor little Hester, Mr. Alfred?” This was exactly what Alfred was turning over in his mind. When Cassius had told down his ransom with Alfred’s assistance, when the necessary forms of business were gone through, and the variety of coins which the pouch contained were fairly transferred to Mitchelson, Alfred said, “Now that our affair of justice is concluded, I am going to bring forward a matter of pure favour.” Mr. Mitchelson, who liked granting favours better than doing justice, looked very gracious. Alfred explained, that by Cassius’s departure, Hester would lose her only friend. He begged that she might be taken from under the charge of Robert and Sukey, and placed with some one who would treat her kindly, and that Mr. Mitchelson would himself inquire after the friendless little girl from time to time. “With the utmost pleasure, Alfred. I shall always pay particular attention, I am sure, to objects that interest you. But would you like to purchase her? I am sorry that I cannot offer, in the present state of my affairs, to give her to you; but the demand shall be moderate if you are disposed to purchase her.” Alfred was also sorry that the state of his own and his father’s affairs was not such as could justify his purchasing slaves. He would fain have made this child free; but as he could not, he consoled himself with the hope that he had secured better treatment for her till he might be able to render her a higher benefit still. Mr. Mitchelson passed his word of honour that she should that day be removed to the dwelling of a gentle-tempered woman, who had lately lost a daughter of about Hester’s age. “Have you nothing to say to me, Cassius?” asked Mr. Mitchelson, as Cassius was turning his back for ever upon his master’s mansion. “Have you no farewell for me, so long as we have lived together?” No, not any. Cassius cared little for good manners just at this moment, and was only in haste to be gone. “Lived together!” said Alfred to himself, as he quitted Paradise. “These slaveholders never dream that they may not use the language of the employers of a free and reasonable service. An English gentleman may speak to his household servants of the time they have ‘lived together;’ but it is too absurd from the slaveholder who despises his slave to the degraded being who hates his owner.” Mitchelson meanwhile was wondering as much at Alfred, thinking, as he watched them from the steps of his mansion,— “That young man is a perfect Quixote, or he could never see anything to care about in such a sullen brute as Cassius. I am glad I was never persuaded to send any of my children to England. No man is fit to be a West Indian planter who has had what is called a good education in England.”