ere over, contrary to all our expectations,
Messrs. Hamilton and Freeland came up to Easton; not to make a bargain
with the "Georgia traders," nor to send us up to Austin Woldfolk, as is
usual in the case of run-away salves,{232} but to release Charles, Henry
Harris, Henry Baily and John Harris, from prison, and this, too, without
the infliction of a single blow. I was now left entirely alone in
prison. The innocent had been taken, and the guilty left. My friends
were separated from me, and apparently forever. This circumstance caused
me more pain than any other incident connected with our capture and
imprisonment. Thirty-nine lashes on my naked and bleeding back, would
have been joyfully borne, in preference to this separation from these,
the friends of my youth. And yet, I could not but feel that I was the
victim of something like justice. Why should these young men, who were
led into this scheme by me, suffer as much as the instigator? I felt
glad that they were leased from prison, and from the dread prospect of a
life (or death I should rather say) in the rice swamps. It is due to
the noble Henry, to say, that he seemed almost as reluctant to leave the
prison with me in it, as he was to be tied and dragged to prison. But he
and the rest knew that we should, in all the likelihoods of the case, be
separated, in the event of being sold; and since we were now completely
in the hands of our owners, we all concluded it would be best to go
peaceably home.

Not until this last separation, dear reader, had I touched those
profounder depths of desolation, which it is the lot of slaves often
to reach. I was solitary in the world, and alone within the walls of
a stone prison, left to a fate of life-long misery. I had hoped and
expected much, for months before, but my hopes and expectations were now
withered and blasted. The ever dreaded slave life in Georgia, Louisiana
and Alabama--from which escape is next to impossible now, in my
loneliness, stared me in the face. The possibility of ever becoming
anything but an abject slave, a mere machine in the hands of an owner,
had now fled, and it seemed to me it had fled forever. A life of living
death, beset with the innumerable horrors of the cotton field, and the
sugar plantation, seemed to be my doom. The fiends, who rushed into the
prison when we were first put there, continued to visit me,{233} and
to ply me with questions and with their tantalizing remarks. I was
insulted, but h