severely, and then expose their lacerated flesh to the smoke of tobacco stems, causing the most exquisite agony.  William complained to his owner of the treatment of Freeland, but, as in almost all similar instances, the appeal was in vain.  At length he was induced to attempt an escape, not from that love of liberty which subsequently became with him an unconquerable passion, but simply to avoid the cruelty to which he was habitually subjected.  He took refuge in the woods, but was hunted and “traced” by the blood-hounds of a Major O’Fallon, another of “the chivalry of the South,” whose gallant occupation was that of keeping an establishment for the hire of ferocious dogs with which to hunt fugitive slaves.  The young slave received a severe application of “Virginia play” for his attempt to escape.  Happily the military publican soon afterwards failed in business, and William found a better master and a more congenial employment with Captain Cilvers, on board a steam-boat plying between St. Louis and Galena.  At the close of the sailing season he was levied to an hotel-keeper, a native of a free state, but withal of a class which exist north as well as south—­a most inveterate negro hater.  At this period of William’s history, a circumstance occurred, which, although a common incident in the lives of slaves, is one of the keenest trials they have to endure—­the breaking up of his family circle.  Her master wanted money, and he therefore sold Elizabeth and six of her children to seven different purchasers.  The family relationship is almost the only solace of slavery.  While the mother, brothers, and sisters are permitted to meet together in the negro hut after the hour of labour, the slaves are comparatively content with their oppressed condition; but deprive them of this, the only privilege which they as human beings are possessed of, and nothing is left but the animal part of their nature—­the living soul is extinguished within them.  With them there is nothing to love—­everything to hate.  They feel themselves degraded to the condition not only of mere animals, but of the most ill-used animals in the creation.

Not needing the services of his young relative, Dr. Young hired him to the proprietor of the St. Louis Times, the best master William ever had in slavery.  Here he gained the scanty amount of education he acquired at the South.  This kind treatment by his editorial master appears to have engendered in the heart of William a consciousness of his own manhood, and led him into the commission of an offence similar to that perpetrated by Frederick Douglass, under similar circumstances—­the assertion of the right of self-defence.  He gallantly defended himself against the attacks of several boys older and bigger than himself, but in so doing was guilty of the unpardonable sin of lifting his hand against white lads; and the father of one of them, therefore, deemed it consistent with his manhood to lay in wait for the young slave, and beat him over the head with a heavy cane till the blood gushed from his nose and ears.  From the effects of that treatment the poor lad was confined to his bed for five weeks, at the end of which time he found that, to his personal sufferings, were superadded the calamity of the loss of the best master he ever had in slavery.