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She was an immensely fat old Mulotter woman, on the wrong side of Fifty when I knew her, and her Mother had been a slave that had been the Favourite Housekeeper to the English Governor, who, dying, left her her Freedom, and enough Money to carry on that Trade of cleansing clothes which her Daughter afterwards made so profitable. Maum Buckey and I soon became very good friends.

Some friends who took an interest in me, the "bright English lad," as they called me, and who thought I had been treated by Maum Buckey with some unnecessary degree of Harshness, made up a purse of money for me, by which I was enabled to pay my Passage Money in advance, and lay in a stock of Provisions for the voyage; for, save in the way of Schnapps, Cheeses, and Herrings, the Holland ships were at that time but indifferently well Found.

THUS in a sultry colony, among Black Negroes and their cruel Task-masters, and I the clerk to a Mulotter Washerwoman, did I come to be full sixteen years of age, and a stalwart Lad of my inches. But for that Fate, which from the first irrevocably decreed that mine was to be a Roving Life, almost to its end, I might have continued in the employ of Maum Buckey until Manhood overtook me.

You see that these Negroes have no more idea of the pernicious quality of the Sin of Lying, than has a white European shopkeeper deluding a Lady into buying of a lustring or a paduasoy; and see what similar vices there are engendered among savages and Christian folks by opposite causes. We had a fearful war of words together, Maum Buckey and myself.

His son, who was his clerk, used to say: "The old man's feet really aren't so big, if he would not wear such shoes." When his shoes were sent up to dry in the sun, as all sea-shoes must be at times, the midshipmen knew the occasion as a gunboat parade. The flag-officer was styled familiarly in the navy by the epithet Buckey; I never saw it spelled, but the pronunciation was as given.

Speaking only by the Card, and of that which I saw with my own eyes, I don't think that Maum Buckey was any crueller than other slave-owners of her class: for 'tis well known that the Mulotter women are far more severe task-mistresses than the Whites. But, Lord!

And finally, the Distillery had for overseer one, an Englishman, that had been a Horse Couper, and a runner for the Crimps at Wapping, and a supercargo that was not too honest, albeit he had to keep his accounts pretty square with Maum Buckey, than whom there never was a woman who had a keener Eye for business or a finer Scent for a Rogue.

I did not fail to express my gratitude to the hospitable Planter and his Lady, and I gave the Nurse Cubjack half a dollar and a silver tobacco-stopper that had been presented to me by Maum Buckey. As a perverse destiny would have it, this Tobacco-stopper, this harmless trinket, was the very means of my losing my situation, and parting in anger from my Pumpkin-faced Patroness.

She was by right and title, then, Mistress Handsell, with the Christian name of Sarah; but among the coloured people of Kingston she went by the name of Maum Buckey, and, among her more immediate intimates, as "Yaller Sally." And, although she passed for being very Wealthy, I declare that she was nothing but a Washerwoman.

The man upon whom I had most to rely I relied upon all of those gallant men, but the man upon whom I most relied, Buckey O'Neill was standing up, walking up and down in front of his men, wanting to show them by his example that they must not get nervous, and to reassure them. "Somebody said, 'Captain Captain O'Neill!