lurked in the marshes and lowlands of the West--foe more dreaded than
the redman--malarial typhoid. For four weary months he kept his bed,
hovering between life and death, until the heat of summer was spent
and the first frosts of October came to revive him. Urgent appeals now
came to him to return home; but pride kept him from yielding. After
paying all his bills, he still had forty dollars left. He resolved to
push on farther into the interior.[18]

He was far from well when he took the canal boat from Cleveland to
Portsmouth on the Ohio river; but he was now in a reckless and
adventurous mood. He would test his luck by pressing on to Cincinnati.
He had no well-defined purpose: he was in a listless mood, which was
no doubt partly the result of physical exhaustion. From Cincinnati he
drifted on to Louisville, and then to St. Louis. His small funds were
now almost all spent. He must soon find occupation or starve. His
first endeavor was to find a law office where he could earn enough by
copying and other work to pay his expenses while he continued his law
studies. No such opening fell in his way and he had no letters of
introduction here to smooth his path. He was now convinced that he
must seek some small country town. Hearing that Jacksonville,
Illinois, was a thriving settlement, he resolved to try his luck in
this quarter. With much the same desperation with which a gambler
plays his last stake, he took passage on a river boat up the Illinois,
and set foot upon the soil of the great prairie State.[19]

A primitive stage coach plied between the river and Jacksonville. Too
fatigued to walk the intervening distance, Douglass mounted the
lumbering vehicle and ruefully paid his fare. From this point of
vantage he took in the prairie landscape. Morgan County was then but
sparsely populated. Timber fringed the creeks and the river bottoms,