"Now, that's just where the difficulty lies. It is the child of one of
my girls, but it looks so much like me, that my wife don't want it on
the place. I am too hard up just now to take the child and her mother,
North, and take care of them there. And to tell you the truth I am too
humane to have the child sold here as a slave. Now in a word do you
think that among your Abolitionist friends in the North you could find
any one who would raise the child and bring it up like a white child."

"I don't know about that St. Pierre. There are a number of our people in
the North, who do two things. They hate slavery and hate negroes. They
feel like the woman who in writing to her husband said, they say (or
don't say) that absence conquers love; for the longer you stay away the
better I love you. But then I know some who, I believe, are really
sincere, and who would do anything to help the colored people. I think I
know two or three families who would be willing to take the child, and
do a good part by her. If you say so, I will write to a friend whom I
have now in mind, and if they will consent I will take the child with me
when I go North, provided I can do it without having it discovered that
she is colored, for it would put me in an awkward fix to have it known
that I took a colored child away with me."

"Oh, never fear," said St. Pierre, slapping his friend on the shoulder.
"The child is whiter than you are, and you know you can pass for white."

True to his promise, Josiah Collins wrote to a Quaker friend, whom he
knew in Pennsylvania, and told him the particulars of the child's
history, and the wishes of her father, and the compensation he would
give. In a few days he received a favorable response in which the friend
told him he was glad to have the privilege of rescuing one of that fated
race from a doom more cruel than the grave; that the compensation was no