When they all arrived at the mayor’s office, at the hour appointed for trial, the captain protested that he had no knowledge of anything wrong in the business, having merely taken care of the boy at the request of a passenger.  When he was required to appear at the next court to answer to the charge of kidnapping, he became alarmed, and told where Captain Dana could be arrested.  His directions were followed, and the delinquent was seized and taken to Isaac T. Hopper’s house.  He was in a towering passion, protesting his innocence, and threatening vengeance against everybody who should attempt to detain him.  Badly as Friend Hopper thought of the man, he almost wished he had escaped, when he discovered that he had a wife and children to suffer for his misdoings.  His tender heart would not allow him to be present at the trial, lest his wife should be there in distress.  She did not appear, however, and Captain Dana made a full confession, alleging poverty as an excuse.  He was an educated man, and had previously sustained a fair reputation.  He was liberated on bail for fifteen hundred dollars, which was forfeited; but the judgments were never enforced against his securities.

WAGELMA.

Wagelma was a lively intelligent colored boy of ten years old, whom his mother had bound as an apprentice to a Frenchman in Philadelphia.  This man being about to take his family to Baltimore, in the summer of 1801, with the intention of going thence to France, put his apprentice on board a Newcastle packet bound to Baltimore, without having the consent of the boy or his mother, as the laws of Pennsylvania required.  The mother did not even know of his intended departure, till she heard that her child was on board the ship.  Fears that he might be sold into slavery, either in Baltimore or the West Indies, seized upon her mind; and even if that dreadful fate did not await him, there was great probability that she would never see him again.

In her distress she called upon Isaac T. Hopper, immediately after sunrise.  He hastened to the wharf, where the Newcastle packet generally lay, but had the mortification to find that she had already started, and that a gentle breeze was wafting her down the stream.  He mounted a fleet horse, and in twenty minutes arrived at Gloucester Point, three miles below the city.  The ferry at that place was kept by a highly respectable widow, with whom he had been long acquainted.  He briefly stated the case to her, and she at once ordered one of her ferrymen to put him on board the Newcastle packet, which was in sight, and near the Jersey shore.  They made all speed, for there was not a moment to lose.