Seeking what seemed to be the most inviting field for his operations, he decided to move his establishment to Baltimore, going most of the way on foot and lecturing as he went whenever he could find an audience.

His residence in Baltimore came near proving fatal.  A slave-trader, whom he had offended, attacked and brutally beat him on the street.  The consolation he got from the court that tried the ruffian, who was “honorably discharged,” was that he (Lundy) had got “nothing more than he deserved.”  Soon afterwards his printing material and other property was burned by a mob.

He went to Mexico to select a location for a projected colony of colored people.  He traveled almost altogether afoot, observing the strictest economy and supporting himself by occasional jobs of saddlery and harness mending.  In his journal he tells us that he often slept in the open air, the country traversed being mostly new and unsettled.  He was in constant danger from panthers, alligators, and rattlesnakes, while he was cruelly beset by gnats and mosquitoes.  His clothes in the morning, he tells us, would be as wet from heavy dews as if he had fallen into the river.

Intellectually, Lundy was not a great man, but his heart was beyond measurement.  The torch that he carried in the midst of the all but universal darkness of that period emitted but a feeble ray, but he kept it burning, and it possessed the almost invaluable property of being able to transmit its flame to other torches.  It kindled the brand that was wielded by William Lloyd Garrison, and which possessed a wonderful power of illumination.

Garrison was beyond all question a remarkable man.  In the qualities that endow a successful leader in a desperate cause he has never been surpassed.  He had an iron will that was directed by an inflexible conscience.  “To him,” says James Freeman Clarke, “right was right, and wrong was wrong, and he saw no half lights or half shadows between them.”  He was a natural orator.  I never heard him talk, either on or off the platform, but I have heard those who had listened to him, speak of the singular gift he possessed in stating or combating a proposition.  One person who had heard him, often compared him, when dealing with an adversary, to a butcher engaged in dissecting a carcass, and who knew just where to strike every time,—­a homely, but expressive illustration.  His addresses in England on a certain notable occasion, which is dealt with somewhat at length elsewhere, were declared by the first British orators to be models of perfect eloquence.

Lundy and Garrison met by accident.  They were boarding at the same house in Boston, and became acquainted.  Lundy’s mind was full of the subject of slavery, and Garrison’s proved to be receptive soil.  They decided to join forces, and we have the singular spectacle of two poor mechanics—­a journeyman saddler and a journeyman printer—­conspiring to revolutionize the domestic institutions of half of the country.