sacrificed for the deliverance of the oppressed.

By chance one day he came across a copy of the Pennsylvania Freeman,
containing the story of Peter Still, "the Kidnapped and the
Ransomed,"--how he had been torn away from his mother, when a little boy
six years old; how, for forty years and more, he had been compelled to
serve under the yoke, totally destitute as to any knowledge of his
parents' whereabouts; how the intense love of liberty and desire to get
back to his mother had unceasingly absorbed his mind through all these
years of bondage; how, amid the most appalling discouragements, prompted
alone by his undying determination to be free and be reunited with those
from whom he had been sold away, he contrived to buy himself; how, by
extreme economy, from doing over-work, he saved up five hundred dollars,
the amount of money required for his ransom, which, with his freedom,
he, from necessity, placed unreservedly in the confidential keeping of a
Jew, named Joseph Friedman, whom he had known for a long time and could
venture to trust,--how he had further toiled to save up money to defray
his expenses on an expedition in search of his mother and kindred; how,
when this end was accomplished, with an earnest purpose he took his
carpet-bag in his hand, and his heart throbbing for his old home and
people, he turned his mind very privately towards Philadelphia, where he
hoped, by having notices read in the colored churches to the effect that
"forty-one or forty-two years before two little boys[A] were kidnapped
and carried South"--that the memory of some of the older members might
recall the circumstances, and in this way he would be aided in his
ardent efforts to become restored to them.

[Footnote A: Sons of Levin and Sidney--the last names of his parents he
was too young to remember.]