Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/204

Rh but confined to the house by bronchitis, which prevented his calling on me.

I had great interest in him, principally from his autobiography, which I had read, and which bears evidence of a strong and profoundly sensitive spirit, as well as of truth. And this is not always the case with some other autobiographies of fugitive slaves, which are a mixture of truth and fiction, and greatly overdrawn.

There is one part of this narrative which deeply affected me by its beauty, and I will translate it for you. It will give you some idea of the man and his condition as a slave, during the severest period of his slave-life. He was then a youth of seventeen.

“I was somewhat intractable when I came first to Mr. Covey. But a few months of this discipline quite subdued me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me in. I was broken both body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity of mind was crushed; my intelligence was dulled; the desire to read died within me; the cheerful sparkle of my eye was gone; the dark night of slavery lay heavy upon me, and—behold a human being changed into a mere chattel!

“Sunday was my only free time. I spent it in a sort of animal stupidity, between sleeping and waking, under a large tree. Sometimes I rose up; a flash of energetic life—the life of freedom, passed through my soul, accompanied by a gleam of hope, which lit it up for a moment, and then again vanished. And again I sank down, sorrowing over my condition. Sometimes I was tempted to put an end to my life and to Covey's at the same time, but I was withheld by a feeling both of hope and fear.

“Our house stood merely a few steps from Chesapeak Bay, upon whose broad bosom always shone white sails from all the countries of the habitable world. These beautiful vessels, in their shining white garments, so