S WHO RETURN
TO THEIR MASTERS--COMPELLED TO TELL MY CONDITION--SUCCORED BY A
SAILOR--DAVID RUGGLES--THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD--MARRIAGE--BAGGAGE TAKEN
FROM ME--KINDNESS OF NATHAN JOHNSON--MY CHANGE OF NAME--DARK NOTIONS OF
NORTHERN CIVILIZATION--THE CONTRAST--COLORED PEOPLE IN NEW BEDFORD--AN
INCIDENT ILLUSTRATING THEIR SPIRIT--A COMMON LABORER--DENIED WORK AT
MY TRADE--THE FIRST WINTER AT THE NORTH--REPULSE AT THE DOORS OF THE
CHURCH--SANCTIFIED HATE--THE _Liberator_ AND ITS EDITOR.

There is no necessity for any extended notice of the incidents of this
part of my life. There is nothing very striking or peculiar about my
career as a freeman, when viewed apart from my life as a slave. The
relation subsisting between my early experience and that which I am
now about to narrate, is, perhaps, my best apology for adding another
chapter to this book.

Disappearing from the kind reader, in a flying cloud or balloon
(pardon the figure), driven by the wind, and knowing not where I should
land--whether in slavery or in freedom--it is proper that I should
remove, at once, all anxiety, by frankly making known where I alighted.
The flight was a bold and perilous one; but here I am, in the great city
of New York, safe and sound, without loss of blood or bone. In less than
a week after leaving Baltimore, I was walking amid the hurrying throng,
and gazing upon the dazzling wonders of Broadway. The dreams{262} of
my childhood and the purposes of my manhood were now fulfilled. A free
state around me, and a free earth under my feet! What a moment was this
to me! A whole year was pressed into a single day. A new world burst
upon my agitated vision. I have often been asked, by kind friends to
whom I have told my story, how I felt when first I found myself beyond
the limits of slavery; and I must say here, as I have often said to
them, there is scarcely anything about which I could not give a more
satisfactory answer. It was a moment of joyous excitement, which no
words can describe. In a letter to a friend, written soon after reaching
New York. I said I felt as one might be supposed to feel, on escaping
from a den of hungry lions. But, in a moment like that, sensations are
too intense and too rapid for words. Anguish and grief, like darkness
and rain, may be described, but joy and gladness, like the rainbow of
promise, defy alike the pen and pencil.

For ten or fifteen years I had been dragging a heavy chain, with a
huge block attached