know no care or want.'
Emma was silent for a space, as if
'Twere hard to summon up a human voice."

Frank and Mary's mother was my wife's own dear aunt.

After this great diversion from our narrative, which I hope dear
reader, you will excuse, I shall return at once to it.

My wife was torn from her mother's embrace in childhood, and taken to a
distant part of the country. She had seen so many other children
separated from their parents in this cruel manner, that the mere
thought of her ever becoming the mother of a child, to linger out a
miserable existence under the wretched system of American slavery,
appeared to fill her very soul with horror; and as she had taken what I
felt to be an important view of her condition, I did not, at first,
press the marriage, but agreed to assist her in trying to devise some
plan by which we might escape from our unhappy condition, and then be
married.

We thought of plan after plan, but they all seemed crowded with
insurmountable difficulties. We knew it was unlawful for any public
conveyance to take us as passengers, without our master's consent. We
were also perfectly aware of the startling fact, that had we left
without this consent the professional slave-hunters would have soon had
their ferocious bloodhounds baying on our track, and in a short time we
should have been dragged back to slavery, not to fill the more
favourable situations which we had just left, but to be separated for
life, and put to the very meanest and most laborious drudgery; or else
have been tortured to death as examples, in order to strike terror into
the hearts of others, and thereby prevent them from even attempting to
escape from their cruel taskmasters. It is a fact worthy of remark,
that nothing seems to give the slaveholders so much pleasure as the
catching and torturing of fugitives. They had much rather take the
keen and poisonous lash, and with it cut their poor trembling victims
to atoms, than allow one of them to escape to a free country, and
expose the infamous system from which he fled.

The greatest excitement prevails at a slave-hunt. The slaveholders and
their hired ruffians appear to take more pleasure in this inhuman
pursuit than English sportsmen do in chasing a fox or a stag.
Therefore, knowing what we should have been compelled to suffer, if
caught and taken back, we were more than anxious to hit upon a plan
that would lead us safely to a land of liberty.

But, after