As I glance back to the Hampshire Highlands of the dear old Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts, where my father worked as a farmer among the rooks for twenty years to pay off a mortgage of twelve hundred dollars upon his little farm, my elder brother and myself slept in the attic which had one window in the gable end, composed of four lights and those very small.  I remember that attic so distinctly now, with the ears of corn hung by the husks on the bare rafters, the rats running over the floor and sometimes over the faces of the boys; the patter of the rain upon the roof, and the whistle of the wind around that gable end, the sifting of the snows through the hole in the window over the pillow on our bed.  While these things may appear very simple and homely before this great audience, yet I mention them because in this house I had a glimpse of the first great man I ever saw.  It was far in the country, far from the railroad, far from the city, yet into that region there came occasionally a man or woman whose name is a household word in the world.  In those mountains of my boyhood there was then an “underground railroad” running from Virginia to Canada.  It was called an “underground railroad,” although it was a system by which the escaped slaves from Virginia came into Delaware, from Delaware into Philadelphia, then to New York, then to Springfield, and from Springfield my father took the slaves by night to Worthington, Mass., and they were sent on by St. Albans, over the Canada line into liberty.  This “underground railroad” system was composed of a chain of men of whom my father was one link.  One night my father drove up in the dark, and my elder brother and I looked out to see who it was he had! brought home with him.  We supposed he had brought a slave whom he was helping to escape.  Oh, those dreary, dark days, when we were in continual dread lest the United States Marshal should arrest my father, throw him into prison for thus assisting these fugitive slaves.  The gloomy memory of those early years chills me now.  But as we gazed out that dark night, we saw that it was a white man with father and who helped unhitch the horses and put them in the barn.  In the morning this white man sat at the breakfast table and my father introduced him to us, saying:  “Boys, this is Frederick Douglass, the great colored orator,” While I looked at him, giggling as boys will do, Mr. Douglass turned to us and said, “Yes, boys, I am a colored man; my mother was a colored woman and my father a white man,” and said he, “I have never seen my father, and I do not know much about my mother.  I remember her once when she interfered between me and the overseer, who was whipping me, and she received the lash upon her cheek and shoulder, and her blood ran across my face.  I remember washing her blood from my face and clothes.”  That story made a deep impression on us boys, stamped indelibly on our memories.  Frederick Douglass is thus mentioned to illustrate the subject that I have come to teach