there, the next morning, to take the cars for Philadelphia.  The night proved one of the darkest and stormiest which it had ever been my fate to encounter,—­and I have seen some bad weather in my time.  The rain fell in torrents, and the road was only now and then visible by the flashes of the lightning.  But our trusty driver persevered, and, in spite of all obstacles, brought us to Baltimore by the early dawn.  Sayres proceeded by the direct route to Philadelphia.  Having still some apprehensions of pursuit and a requisition, I took the route by Harrisburg.  Great was the satisfaction which I felt as the cars crossed the line from Maryland into Pennsylvania.  It was like escaping out of Algiers into a free and Christian country.

I shall leave it to the reader to imagine the meeting between myself and my family.  They had received notice of my coming, and were all waiting to receive me.  If a man wishes to realize the agony which our American slave-trade inflicts in the separation of families, let him personally feel that separation, as I did; let him pass four years in the Washington jail.

When committed to the prison, I was by no means well.  I had been a good deal out of health, as appeared from the evidence on the trial, for two or three years before.  Close confinement, or, indeed, confinement of any sort, does not agree with persons of my temperament; and I came out of the prison a good deal older, and much more of an invalid, than when I entered it.

The reader, perhaps, will inquire what good was gained by all these sufferings of myself and my family—­what satisfaction I can have, as it did not succeed, in looking back to an enterprise attended with so much risk, and which involved me in so long and tedious an imprisonment?

The satisfaction that I have is this:  What I did, and what I attempted to do, was my protest,—­a protest which resounded from one end of the Union to the other, and which, I hope, by the dissemination of this, my narrative, to renew and repeat it,—­it was my protest against the infamous and atrocious doctrine that there can be any such thing as property in man!  We can only do according to our power, and the capacity, gifts and talents, that we have.  Others, more fortunate than I, may record their protest against this wicked doctrine more safely and comfortably for themselves than I did.  They may embody it in burning words and eloquent speeches; they may write it out in books; they may preach it in sermons.  I could not do that.  I have as many thoughts as another, but, for want of education, I lack the power to express them in speech or writing.  I have not been able to put even this short narrative on paper without obtaining the assistance of a friend.  I could not talk, I could not write; but I could act.  The humblest, the most uneducated man can do that.  I did act; and, by my actions, I protested that I did not believe that there was, or could be, any such thing as a right of property in human beings.