of his having a wife and three children in your service I am also familiar.  This brother, Peter, I have only had the pleasure of knowing for the brief space of one year and thirteen days, although he is now past forty and I twenty-nine years of age.  Time will not allow me at present, or I should give you a detailed account of how Peter became a slave, the forty long years which intervened between the time he was kidnapped, when a boy, being only six years of age, and his arrival in this city, from Alabama, one year and fourteen days ago, when he was re-united to his mother, five brothers and three sisters.

None but a father’s heart can fathom the anguish and sorrows felt by Peter during the many vicissitudes through which he has passed.  He looked back to his boyhood and saw himself snatched from the tender embraces of his parents and home to be made a slave for life.

During all his prime days he was in the faithful and constant service of those who had no just claim upon him.  In the meanwhile he married a wife, who bore him eleven children, the greater part of whom were emancipated from the troubles of life by death, and three only survived.  To them and his wife he was devoted.  Indeed I have never seen attachment between parents and children, or husband and wife, more entire than was manifested in the case of Peter.

Through these many years of servitude, Peter was sold and resold, from one State to another, from one owner to another, till he reached the forty-ninth year of his age, when, in a good Providence, through the kindness of a friend and the sweat of his brow, he regained the God-given blessings of liberty.  He eagerly sought his parents and home with all possible speed and pains, when, to his heart’s joy, he found his relatives.

Your present humble correspondent is the youngest of Peter’s brothers, and the first one of the family he saw after arriving in this part of the country.  I think you could not fail to be interested in hearing how we became known to each other, and the proof of our being brothers, etc., all of which I should be most glad to relate, but time will not permit me to do so.  The news of this wonderful occurrence, of Peter finding his kindred, was published quite extensively, shortly afterwards, in various newspapers, in this quarter, which may account for the fact of “Miller’s” knowledge of the whereabouts of the “fugitives.”  Let me say, it is my firm conviction that no one had any hand in persuading “Miller” to go down from Cincinnati, or any other place, after the family.  As glad as I should be, and as much as I would do for the liberation of Peter’s family (now no longer young), and his three “likely” children, in whom he prides himself—­how much, if you are a father, you can imagine; yet I would not, and could not, think of persuading any friend to peril his life, as would be the case, in an errand of that kind.