e on one of your gallant decks, and under your
protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go
on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O,
why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone;
she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending
slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any
God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught,
or get clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever.
I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die
standing. Only think of it; one hundred miles straight north, and I am
free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall
live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet
bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in a north-east course from
North Point. I will do the same; and when I get to the head of the bay,
I will turn my canoe adrift, and walk straight through Delaware into
Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be required to have a pass;
I can travel without being disturbed. Let but the first opportunity
offer, and, come what will, I am off. Meanwhile, I will try to bear up
under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the world. Why should I fret?
I can bear as much as any of them. Besides, I am but a boy, and all boys
are bound to some one. It may be that my misery in slavery will only
increase my happiness when I get free. There is a better day coming."

Thus I used to think, and thus I used to speak to myself; goaded almost
to madness at one moment, and at the next reconciling myself to my
wretched lot.

I have already intimated that my condition was much worse, during the
first six months of my stay at Mr. Covey's, than in the last six. The
circumstances leading to the change in Mr. Covey's course toward me form
an epoch in my humble history. You have seen how a man was made a slave;
you shall see how a slave was made a man. On one of the hottest days
of the month of August, 1833, Bill Smith, William Hughes, a slave named
Eli, and myself, were engaged in fanning wheat. Hughes was clearing the
fanned wheat from before the fan. Eli was turning, Smith was feeding,
and I was carrying wheat to the fan. The work was simple, requiring
strength rather than intellect; yet, to one entirely unused to such
work, it came very hard. About three o'clock of that day, I broke d