logic, rhetoric, and the Greek Testament, without a master. While thus
struggling in my laudable work, an opening presented itself which was not
less surprising than gratifying. Walking on the street one day, I met a
friend, who said to me, "I have just had an application to supply a
teacher for a school, and I have recommended you." I said, "My dear
friend, I am obliged to you for the kindness; but I fear I cannot sustain
an examination for that station." "Oh," said he, "try." I said, "I will,"
and we separated. Two weeks afterwards, I met the trustees of the school,
was examined, accepted, and agreed with them for a salary of two hundred
dollars per annum; commenced my school, and succeeded. This was five
years, three months, and thirteen days after I came from the South.

As the events of my life since that have been of a public professional
nature, I will say no more about it. My object in writing this tract is
now completed. It has been to shew the reader the hand of God with a
slave; and to elicit your sympathy in behalf of the fugitive slave, by
shewing some of the untold dangers and hardships through which he has to
pass to gain liberty, and how much he needs friends on free soil; and that
men who have felt the yoke of slavery, even in its mildest form, cannot be
expected to speak of the system otherwise than in terms of the most
unqualified condemnation.

There is one sin that slavery committed against me, which I never can
forgive. It robbed me of my education; the injury is irreparable; I feel
the embarrassment more seriously now than I ever did before. It cost me
two years' hard labour, after I fled, to unshackle my mind; it was three
years before I had purged my language of slavery's idioms; it was four
years before I had thrown off the crouching aspect of slavery; and now the
evil that besets me is a great lack of that general information, the
foundation of which is most effectually laid in that part of life which I