could
venture to trust,--how he had further toiled to save up money to defray
his expenses on an expedition in search of his mother and kindred; how,
when this end was accomplished, with an earnest purpose he took his
carpet-bag in his hand, and his heart throbbing for his old home and
people, he turned his mind very privately towards Philadelphia, where he
hoped, by having notices read in the colored churches to the effect that
"forty-one or forty-two years before two little boys[A] were kidnapped
and carried South"--that the memory of some of the older members might
recall the circumstances, and in this way he would be aided in his
ardent efforts to become restored to them.

[Footnote A: Sons of Levin and Sidney--the last names of his parents he
was too young to remember.]

And, furthermore, Seth Concklin had read how, on arriving in
Philadelphia, after traveling sixteen hundred miles, that almost the
first man whom Peter Still sought advice from was his own unknown
brother (whom he had never seen or heard of), who made the discovery
that he was the long-lost boy, whose history and fate had been enveloped
in sadness so long, and for whom his mother had shed so many tears and
offered so many prayers, during the long years of their separation; and,
finally, how this self-ransomed and restored captive, notwithstanding
his great success, was destined to suffer the keenest pangs of sorrow
for his wife and children, whom he had left in Alabama bondage.

Seth Concklin was naturally too singularly sympathetic and humane not to
feel now for Peter, and especially for his wife and children left in
bonds as bound with them. Hence, as Seth was a man who seemed wholly
insensible to fear, and to know no other law of humanity and right, than
whenever the claims of the suffering and the wronged appealed to him, to
respond unreservedly, whether those thus injured were amongst his
nearest kin or the greatest strangers,--it mattered not to what race or
clime they might belong,--he, in the spirit of the good Samaritan,
owning all such as his neighbors, volunteered his services, without pay
or reward, to go and rescue the wife and three children of Peter Still.

The magnitude of this offer can hardly be appreciated. It was literally
laying his life on the altar of freedom for the despised and oppressed
whom he had never seen, whose kins-folk even he was not acquainted with.
At this juncture even Peter was not prepared to accept this pr