Accident, happily turned to his profit, served to introduce him to the
townspeople of Winchester. The morning after his arrival, he found a
crowd in the public square and learned that an auction sale of
personal effects was about to take place. Everyone from the
administrator of the estate to the village idler, was eager for the
sale to begin. But a clerk to keep record of the sales and to draw the
notes was wanting. The eye of the administrator fell upon Douglass;
something in the youth's appearance gave assurance that he could
"cipher.". The impatient bystanders "'lowed that he might do," so he
was given a trial. Douglass proved fully equal to the task, and in two
days was in possession of five dollars for his pains.[29]

Through the good will of the village storekeeper, who also hailed from
Vermont, Douglass was presented to several citizens who wished to see
a school opened in town; and by the first Monday in December he had a
subscription list of forty scholars, each of whom paid three dollars
for three months' tuition.[30] Luck was now coming his way. He found
lodgings under the roof of this same friendly compatriot, the village
storekeeper, who gave him the use of a small room adjoining the
store-room.[31] Here Douglass spent his evenings, devoting some hours
to his law books and perhaps more to comfortable chats with his host
and talkative neighbors around the stove. For diversion he had the
weekly meetings of the Lyceum, which had just been formed.[32] He owed
much to this institution, for the the debates and discussions gave him
a chance to convert the traditional leadership which fell to him as
village schoolmaster, into a real leadership of talent and ready wit.
In this Lyceum he made his first political speech, defending Andrew
Jackson and his attack upon the Bank against Josiah Lamborn, a lawyer
from Jacksonville.[33] For a young man he proved himself astonishingly