Boston with a message, which was to change the whole purpose of the
young editor's life. It was Benjamin Lundy, the indefatigable friend of
the Southern slave, the man who carried within his breast the whole
menagerie of Southern slavery. He was fresh from the city which held the
dust of Fanny Garrison, who had once written to her boy in Newburyport,
how the good God had cared for her in the person of a colored woman.
Yes, she had written: "The ladies are all kind to me, and I have a
colored woman that waits on me, that is so kind no one can tell how kind
she is; and although a slave to man, yet a free-born soul, by the grace
of God. Her name is Henny, and should I never see you again, and you
should come where she is, remember her, for your poor mother's sake."
And now, without his dreaming of it, this devoted Samaritan in black,
who, perhaps, had long ago joined her dear friend in the grave, was
coming to that very boy, now grown to manhood, to claim for her race
what the mother had asked for her, the kind slave-woman. Not one of all
those little ones of the nation but who had a home in the many-mansioned
heart of Lundy. He had been an eye and ear witness of the barbarism of
slavery. "My heart," he sobbed, "was deeply grieved at the gross
abomination; I heard the wail of the captive; I felt his pang of
distress, and the iron entered my soul." With apostolic faith and zeal
he had for a decade been striving to free the captive, and to tie up his
bruised spirit. Sadly, but with a great love, he had gone about the
country on his self-imposed task. To do this work he had given up the
business of a saddler, in which he had prospered, had sacrificed his
possessions, and renounced the ease that comes with wealth; had courted
unheard-of hardships, and wedded himself for better and worse to poverty
and unremitting endeavor. Nothing did he esteem too dear to relinquish
for the slave. Neither wife nor children did he withhold. Neither the
summer's heat nor the winter's cold was able to daunt him or turn him
from his object. Though diminutive and delicate of body, no distance or