ily of half-caste children, brought to the
very levee by their white father. He had made the journey during his
death-struggle, hoping to leave his children free men upon free ground:
but just as he approached the levee, he died; and his heir, in eager
pursuit, seized the children around their father's lifeless form, before
they had time to land, and hurried them away, his hopeless, helpless
slaves. Then it was a woman with a child in her arms, flying through the
great thoroughfares of the city, with her pursuers behind her--a mad,
wild, brutal chase. Then it was a pretty mulatto child, the pride and
delight of its parents, abstracted in the evening by prowling thieves,
from a colored family in our immediate vicinity. Lost forever! never
more to be heard of by its terrified and sorrowing parents! Then came
the terrible tragedy of that poor mother who, being seized as she was
escaping with her children, and thrown into jail, 'preferred for her
dear ones the guardianship of angels to the oppression of man,' and
killed them in the prison with her own hands, one by one, the jailer
only entering in time to arrest the knife as she was about to strike it
into her own despairing heart.

But though from time to time circumstances such as these were noised
abroad and made known to all, I knew that there were innumerable
thrilling stories, often less tragic in their conclusion, known only to
the more successful fugitive and his own immediate friends. I heard
rumors of an underground railway, as it was termed, a mysterious agency
keeping watch for fugitives, and assisting them on their journey,
passing them on secretly and speedily from point to point on their way
to Canada. I knew that such a combination existed on my right hand and
on my left, and under my very eyes; but who might be concerned in it, or
how it might be managed, I could not in the least divine. One day a
gleam of light came to me upon the subject. Our minister, a good old
man, who preached with great eloquence on the subject of human
depravity, and pointedly enough upon many of the sins of the age, but
who had never taken any clear and open ground on the subject of slavery,
had a daughter who was warmly and avowedly anti-slavery in principle. We
became friends; and as my intimacy with her increased, we sometimes
spoke of the fugitives.

One day she owned to me that she had some connection with this
underground railway, principally in the way of providing with old