At a Girl's Mercy, or, The Fortunes of War — page 66: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AT A GIRL’S MEROY. ap, aR freedom an’ a resk fer it .or slavery, an’ mebby no resk, but a powerfu’ sight worse. So choose, an’ I’ll be off.’’ To get away from the chains that bound her un- lawfully; to be free—free as she should be, but for man’s treachery; to get to the North, where all men were free, the white and the black—free as God made them, each with his life and his soul to make ormar. And all she need do was to go with this man as he wished, to follow his directions with no responsibility upon her but to obey; to be married— that was his plan—as soon as they should reach a place where it would be possible, and then to go to Boston, where they would be safe, and live their lives as they would. But how could she do this, and leave her mother still in bondage, a bondage that had always been hateful to her, bound as she was through a white man’s treachery, ay, and bound, without any bonds, to another white man, through treachery worse than the first. The page of her life flashed up in the heart of the mulatto as she stood with her lover watching the cloudless moon. | Her grandmother, one of the Shawnee tribe of In- dians, had been bound out to a gentleman until she was eighteen; then she was to be given her liberty, and left free.to go where she pleased. Instead of this, the man, who had treated her well enough, but was too much given to the races and the gaming table to hesitate if one of his servants stood in the way, had taken her to a town some seventy miles from his home, promising her at the end of the jour- ney the papers that would set her free. And then, when he left her at a house to go out, presumably to attend to some business in regard to these papers, Eomicbooks (elo a a“