ject with
a troubled soul, I saw in the distance the figure of a student of
theology, whom I knew to be a friend of our old minister and his
daughter, and thoroughly anti-slavery in principle. I hastened after
him, told him the circumstances of the case, and imparted to him my
misgivings. He promised me to put the matter into safe hands, and to
have a look-out kept for the wanderers. After a few hours he returned to
me with the welcome intelligence that the fugitives had been overtaken
on the turnpike road a mile or two beyond, by one of the emissaries of
the underground railway in a covered cart, in which they had been
comfortably stowed, and safely forwarded on their way, and that from
that time forth they would be speedily and quietly passed from point to
point and from friend to friend, until they reached their destination.

A weight was lifted from my heart, I could have danced for joy; and I
learned with astonishment, that the agent, who had come like an angel to
the relief of the poor fugitives, was no other than a little ugly negro
man, who had often worked in our garden, and who was usually employed to
do the roughest and dirtiest work in the neighborhood. His crooked
figure, his bandy legs, and little ape-like head, had always led me to
regard him as the most unpromising specimen of his race that I had ever
beheld; but from that time forth I regarded him with respect. The poor
crooked form, distorted by hard toil, contained a heart, and the little
ape-like head a brain, to help his outcast brethren in the hour of need.

As time passed on, the borders of the wood of which I have already
spoken, began to be invaded by the woodman. Rough, ragged bits were
cleared, and cheap, slight, frame houses sprang up, some of them erected
and owned by the workmen in the neighborhood, some of them put up by
speculators, and rented to a poor class of tenants. Playing about
outside one of these shanties, a pretty child might soon be seen, a
fair-haired, blue-eyed boy of five years old or thereabouts. So regular
were his features, so white his skin, it would hardly have been
suspected that he had any but European blood in his veins, had it not
been known that the house was occupied by colored people, to whom he
seemed to belong. An old man was said to be lying ill in the house,
which was rented by two colored women, who were anxious to get work in
the neighborhood, or washing and sewing to do at home. At that time I
was prepari