for his work. He was soon lost to sight among
the throng, and I was alone again, an easy prey to the kidnappers, if
any should happen to be on my track.

New York, seventeen years ago, was less a place of safety for a runaway
slave than now, and all know how unsafe it now is, under the new
fugitive slave bill. I was much troubled. I had very little money enough
to buy me a few loaves of bread, but not enough to pay board, outside a
lumber yard. I saw the wisdom of keeping away from the ship yards, for
if Master Hugh pursued me, he would naturally expect to find me looking
for work among the calkers. For a time, every door seemed closed against
me. A sense of my loneliness and helplessness crept over me,{264}
and covered me with something bordering on despair. In the midst of
thousands of my fellowmen, and yet a perfect stranger! In the midst of
human brothers, and yet more fearful of them than of hungry wolves!
I was without home, without friends, without work, without money, and
without any definite knowledge of which way to go, or where to look for
succor.

Some apology can easily be made for the few slaves who have, after
making good their escape, turned back to slavery, preferring the actual
rule of their masters, to the life of loneliness, apprehension, hunger,
and anxiety, which meets them on their first arrival in a free state. It
is difficult for a freeman to enter into the feelings of such fugitives.
He cannot see things in the same light with the slave, because he does
not, and cannot, look from the same point from which the slave does.
"Why do you tremble," he says to the slave "you are in a free state;"
but the difficulty is, in realizing that he is in a free state, the
slave might reply. A freeman cannot understand why the slave-master's
shadow is bigger, to the slave, than the might and majesty of a free
state; but when he reflects that the slave knows more about the slavery
of his master than he does of the might and majesty of the free state,
he has the explanation. The slave has been all his life learning the
power of his master--being trained to dread his approach--and only a few
hours learning the power of the state. The master is to him a stern and
flinty reality, but the state is little more than a dream. He has been
accustomed to regard every white man as the friend of his master, and
every colored man as more or less under the control of his master's
friends--the white people. It takes stout nerv