That travelled creation of the great satirist's
brain, who fresh from living among horses, peered from a high
casement down upon his own kind with trembling horror, was scarcely
more repelled and daunted by the sight, than those who look upon
some of these faces for the first time must surely be.
I left the last of them behind me in the person of a wretched
drudge, who, after running to and fro all day till midnight, and
moping in his stealthy winks of sleep upon the stairs
betweenwhiles, was washing the dark passages at four o'clock in the
morning; and went upon my way with a grateful heart that I was not
doomed to live where slavery was, and had never had my senses
blunted to its wrongs and horrors in a slave-rocked cradle.
It had been my intention to proceed by James River and Chesapeake
Bay to Baltimore; but one of the steamboats being absent from her
station through some accident, and the means of conveyance being
consequently rendered uncertain, we returned to Washington by the
way we had come (there were two constables on board the steamboat,
in pursuit of runaway slaves), and halting there again for one
night, went on to Baltimore next afternoon.
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