number. I have often been asked how I felt when first I found
myself on free soil. There is scarcely anything in my experience about
which I could not give a more satisfactory answer. A new world had
opened upon me. If life is more than breath and the "quick round of
blood," I lived more in that one day than in a year of my slave life. It
was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe. In
a letter written to a friend soon after reaching New York, I said: "I
felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions." Anguish
and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy,
like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil. During ten or fifteen
years I had been, as it were, dragging a heavy chain which no strength of
mine could break; I was not only a slave, but a slave for life. I might
become a husband, a father, an aged man, but through all, from birth to
death, from the cradle to the grave, I had felt myself doomed. All
efforts I had previously made to secure my freedom had not only failed,
but had seemed only to rivet my fetters the more firmly, and to render my
escape more difficult. Baffled, entangled, and discouraged, I had at
times asked myself the question, May not my condition after all be God's
work, and ordered for a wise purpose, and if so, Is not submission my
duty? A contest had in fact been going on in my mind for a long time,
between the clear consciousness of right and the plausible make-shifts of
theology and superstition. The one held me an abject slave--a prisoner
for life, punished for some transgression in which I had no lot nor part;
and the other counseled me to manly endeavor to secure my freedom. This
contest was now ended; my chains were broken, and the victory brought me
unspeakable joy.

But my gladness was short-lived, for I was not yet out of the reach and
power of the slave-holders. I soon found that New York was not quite so
free or so safe a refuge as I had supposed, and a sense of loneliness and
insecurity again oppressed me most sadly. I chanced to meet on the
street, a few hours after my landing, a fugitive slave whom I had once
known well in slavery. The information received from him alarmed me.
The fugitive in question was known in Baltimore as "Allender's Jake," but
in New York he wore the more respectable name of "William Dixon." Jake,
in law, was the property of Doctor Allender, and Tolly Allender, the son
of the