The widow, a beautiful woman, neglected by her husband's connection, who were sullen at the loss of their investment and their expected profits from the vessel, lived in the little house she had owned before her marriage, and sank into the plainer class of people, almost losing her identity with the ruling families to which her son was kin, but in her humbler class highly respected and solicited in marriage.

She was still young and fair, and Jimmy Phoebus, a hale bachelor, and captain of a trading schooner, had endeavored to marry her for years, and held on to his hope patiently, exercising many kind offices for her, though his means were limited, and he had poor kin looking to him for help. She feared the absent lover might be alive and return to find her another's wife.

So her son, growing up without a father's discipline, and being too respectable, it was supposed, to put to a trade or be indentured, lived by fugitive pursuits on land and water, hauling and peddling vegetables and provisions at times; and now, by the gift of Jimmy Phoebus, he sailed his little sloop or cat-boat chiefly to carry terrapin to Baltimore. Rough sailor acquaintances, exposure, a credulous, easily led nature, and almost total neglect of school at a time when education was a high privilege, had made him wayward and often intemperate, but without developing any selfish or cruel characteristics, and being of an agreeable exterior and affable disposition, he fell a prey to any strangers who might be in town - gunners, negro buyers, idle planters, and spreeing overseers, many of whom hired his company and vessel to take their excursions; and, while loving his mother, and being her only reliance, she saw him slipping further and further into manhood without steadiness or education or fixed principles, or any female influence to draw him to domestic constraints.

His slender, supple figure, and marks of gentility in his limbs, and shapely brow and large, gentle eyes, poorly consorted with ragged clothes, bare feet, and absolute dependence on chance employment, the latter becoming more precarious as his age and stature made more demands for money through his false appetites.

"Jack," said Levin Dennis, "what do you mean by gittin' money to buy Roxy Custis? You never git no money."

"Won't he give it to me? Him?" Jack Wonnell indicated the hatchway down which Joe Johnson had gone. "He's got bags of it."

"Him? Why, Jack, how much money do you s'pose a beautiful servant like Roxy will fetch?"

"Won't that piece he's gwyn to give you buy her?"

"Five dollars? Why, you poor fool, she will bring five hundred dollars - maybe thousands. This nigger trader, with all his gold, would be hard pushed, I 'spect, to buy Roxy."

Jack looked downcast, and failed to wink or whistle.

"Gals like her," said Levin, "goes for mistresses to rich men, an' sometimes they eddicates 'em, I've hearn tell, to know music, an' writin', an' grammar, an' them things."