for quickening
the speed of the child, rolling the apple some yards before them, when
the boy would run with all his might after it; and this ruse, often
repeated, carried them over many a half-mile.

After a while, they came to a thick patch of woodland, through which
murmured a clear brook. As the child complained of hunger and thirst,
she climbed over the fence with him; and, sitting down behind a large
rock which concealed them from the road, she gave him a breakfast out of
her little package. The boy wondered and grieved that she could not eat;
and when, putting his arms round her neck, he tried to wedge some of
his cake into her mouth, it seemed to her that the rising in her throat
would choke her.

"No, no, Harry darling! mother can't eat till you are safe! We must go
on--on--till we come to the river!" And she hurried again into the road,
and again constrained herself to walk regularly and composedly forward.

She was many miles past any neighborhood where she was personally known.
If she should chance to meet any who knew her, she reflected that
the well-known kindness of the family would be of itself a blind to
suspicion, as making it an unlikely supposition that she could be a
fugitive. As she was also so white as not to be known as of colored
lineage, without a critical survey, and her child was white also, it was
much easier for her to pass on unsuspected.

On this presumption, she stopped at noon at a neat farmhouse, to rest
herself, and buy some dinner for her child and self; for, as the danger
decreased with the distance, the supernatural tension of the nervous
system lessened, and she found herself both weary and hungry.

The good woman, kindly and gossipping, seemed rather pleased than
otherwise with having somebody come in to talk with; and accepted,
without examination, Eliza's statement, that she "was going on a little
piece, to spend a week with her friends,"--all which she hoped in her
heart might prove strictly true.

An hour before sunset, she entered the village of T----, by the Ohio
river, weary and foot-sore, but still strong in heart. Her first glance
was at the river, which lay, like Jordan, between her and the Canaan of
liberty on the other side.

It was now early spring, and the river was swollen and turbulent; great
cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and fro in the turbid
waters. Owing to the peculiar form of the shore on the Kentucky side,
the land bending far out in