It was thought advisable that I should avoid that village by taking a roundabout road.  That I did, although it added an extra half to my trip.  The result was that the sun was just peeping over the eastern hills, as I reached a set of bars showing an entrance into a pasture lot on one side of the highway.  Removing the bars, I drove into the field, and passing over a ridge that hid it from the road, I stopped in front of a log cabin that had every appearance of being an abandoned and neglected homestead.  That was the station I was looking for.  Arousing my sleeping passengers, I saw them enter the old domicile, where I bade them good-by, and received the tearful and repeated thanks of the youthful slave mother, speaking for herself and her offspring.  I never saw them again, but in due time the news came back, over what was jocularly called the ‘grape-vine telegraph,’ that they had safely reached their destination.

“At the home of the station agent I was enthusiastically received.  That a boy of eleven should accomplish what I had done was thought to be quite wonderful.  I was given an excellent breakfast, and then shown to a room with a bed, where I had a good sleep.  On my awakening I set out on the return journey, this time taking the most direct route, as I had then no fear of that hireling constable.

“Subsequently I passed through several experiences of a similar kind, some of them involving greater risks and more exciting incidents, but the recollection of none of them brings me greater satisfaction than the memory of my first conductorship on the Underground.

  “All of which is respectfully submitted by

  “JOHN SMITH.”

CHAPTER XVII

COLONIZATION

I have had a good deal to say about Anti-Slavery societies.  There was another society which was called into existence by the slavery situation.  Whether it was pro-slavery or anti-slavery was a question that long puzzled a good many people.  It was the Colonization Society.  A good many Anti-Slavery people believed in it for a time and gave it their support.  “I am opposed to slavery, but I am not an Abolitionist:  I am a Colonizationist,” was a declaration that, when I was a boy, I heard many and many times, and from the lips of well-intending people.

It did not take the sharp-sighted leaders of the Abolition movement very long to discover that one of the uses its managers expected to make of the Colonization Society was as a shield for slavery.  It kept a number of excellent people from joining in an aggressive movement against it, took their money, and made them believe that they were at work for the freedom of the negro.

Strangely as it might appear, the negroes, who were assumed to be the beneficiaries of the colonization scheme, were opposed to it.  Quicker than the white people generally did, they saw through its false pretense, and, besides, they could not understand why they should be taken from the land of their nativity, and sent to the country from which their progenitors had come, any more than the descendants of Scotch, English, and German immigrants should be deported to the lands of their ancestors.