he appeared, stealing away at night to a
lonely hut, and by the light of a pine-knot, wearily poring over the
BOOK of BOOKS, slowly putting letters into words, and words into
sentences, that he might know _"What God says to the black man."_ Then
he seemed a man--splendid of frame, noble of soul--suspended in the
whipping-rack, his arms bound above his head, his body resting on the
tips of his toes, and the merciless lash falling on his bare back, till
the red stream ran from it like a river--scourged because he would not
aid in creating beings as wretched as himself, and make merchandise of
his own blood to gorge the pocket of an incarnate white devil.

As these things passed before me, and I thought of his rare
intelligence, of his fine traits of character, and of the true heroism
he had shown in risking, perhaps, his own life to get me--a
stranger--out of an ugly hobble, I felt a certain spot in my left side
warming toward him, very much as it might have done had his blood been
as pure as my own. It seemed to me a pity--anti-Abolitionist and
Southern-sympathizer though I was--that a man of such rare natural
talent, such character and energy, should have his large nature dwarfed,
be tethered for life to a cotton-stalk, and made to wear his soul out in
a tread-mill, merely because his skin had a darker tinge and his shoe a
longer heel than mine.

As I mused over his "strange, eventful history," and thought of the
handy way nature has of putting the _right_ man in the _wrong_ place, it
occurred to me how "Brother Beecher" one evening, not a long time
before, had charmed the last dollar from my waistcoat pocket by
exhibiting, _a la_ Barnum, a remarkably ugly "cullud pusson" on his
pulpit stairs, and by picturing the awful doom which awaited her--that
of being reduced from baby-tending to some less useful employment--if
his audience did not at once "do the needful." Then it occurred to me
how much finer a spectacle my ebony friend would make; how well his six
feet of manly sinew would grace those pulpit stairs; how eloquently the
reverend gentleman might expatiate on the burning sin of shrouding the
light of such an intellect in the mists of niggerdom, only to see it
snuffed out in darkness; how he might enlarge on what the black could do
in elevating his race, either as "cullud" assistant to "Brother Pease"
at the Five-Points, or as co-laborer with Fred Douglass at abolition
conventions, or, if that didn't _pay_, how, p