hing in my
experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A
new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath and the "quick
round of blood," I lived more in that one day than in a year of my slave
life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely
describe. In a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York,
I said: "I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry
lions." Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but
gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil.
During ten or fifteen years I had been, as it were, dragging a heavy
chain which no strength of mine could break; I was not only a slave, but
a slave for life. I might become a husband, a father, an aged man, but
through all, from birth to death, from the cradle to the grave, I had
felt myself doomed. All efforts I had previously made to secure my
freedom had not only failed, but had seemed only to rivet my fetters the
more firmly, and to render my escape more difficult. Baffled, entangled,
and discouraged, I had at times asked myself the question, May not my
condition after all be God's work, and ordered for a wise purpose, and
if so, Is not submission my duty? A contest had in fact been going on
in my mind for a long time, between the clear consciousness of right and
the plausible make-shifts of theology and superstition. The one held me
an abject slave--a prisoner for life, punished for some transgression
in which I had no lot nor part; and the other counseled me to manly
endeavor to secure my freedom. This contest was now ended; my chains
were broken, and the victory brought me unspeakable joy.

But my gladness was short-lived, for I was not yet out of the reach and
power of the slave-holders. I soon found that New York was not quite so
free or so safe a refuge as I had supposed, and a sense of loneliness
and insecurity again oppressed me most sadly. I chanced to meet on the
street, a few hours after my landing, a fugitive slave whom I had once
known well in slavery. The information received from him alarmed me. The
fugitive in question was known in Baltimore as "Allender's Jake," but in
New York he wore the more respectable name of "William Dixon." Jake, in
law, was the property of Doctor Allender, and Tolly Allender, the son
of the doctor, had once made an effort to recapture MR. DIXON, but
had failed for want of evidence to support his claim. Jake to