forever, was like that of having the heart wrenched from its socket; while the idea of being conveyed to the far South, seemed infinitely worse than the terrors of death.  To know, also, that I was never to consult my own will, but was, while I lived, to be entirely under the control of another, was another state of mind hard for me to bear.  Indeed all things now made me feel, what I had before known only in words, that I was a slave.  Deep was this feeling, and it preyed upon my heart like a never-dying worm.  I saw no prospect that my condition would ever be changed.  Yet I used to plan in my mind from day to day, and from night to night, how I might be free.

One day, while I was in this state of mind, my father gave me a small basket of peaches.  I sold them for thirty cents, which was the first money I ever had in my life.  Afterwards I won some marbles, and sold them for sixty cents, and some weeks after Mr. Hog from Fayetteville, came to visit my master, and on leaving gave me one dollar.  After that Mr. Bennahan from Orange county gave me a dollar, and a son of my master fifty cents.  These sums, and the hope that then entered my mind of purchasing at some future time my freedom, made me long for money; and plans for money-making took the principal possession of my thoughts.  At night I would steal away with my axe, get a load of wood to cut for twenty-five cents, and the next morning hardly escape a whipping for the offence.  But I persevered until I had obtained twenty dollars.  Now I began to think seriously of becoming able to buy myself; and cheered by this hope, I went on from one thing to another, laboring “at dead of night,” after the long weary day’s toil for my master was over, till I found I had collected one hundred dollars.  This sum I kept hid, first in one place and then in another, as I dare not put it out, for fear I should lose it.

After this I lit upon a plan which proved of great advantage to me.  My father suggested a mode of preparing smoking tobacco, different from any then or since employed.  It had the double advantage of giving the tobacco a peculiarly pleasant flavor, and of enabling me to manufacture a good article out of a very indifferent material.  I improved somewhat upon his suggestion, and commenced the manufacture, doing as I have before said, all my work in the night.  The tobacco I put up in papers of about a quarter of a pound each, and sold them at fifteen cents.  But the tobacco could not be smoked without a pipe, and as I had given the former a flavor peculiarly grateful, it occurred to me that I might so construct a pipe as to cool the smoke in passing through it, and thus meet the wishes of those who are more fond of smoke than heat.  This I effected by means of a reed, which grows plentifully in that region; I made a passage through the reed with a hot wire, polished it, and attached a clay pipe to the end, so that the smoke should be cooled in flowing through the stem like whiskey or rum in passing from the boiler through the worm of the still.  These pipes I sold at ten cents apiece.  In the early part of the night I would sell my tobacco and pipes, and manufacture them in the latter part.  As the Legislature sit in Raleigh every year, I sold these articles considerably to the members, so that I became known not only in the city, but in many parts of the State, as a tobacconist.