among the slaves; for the doings at one plantation were soon
conveyed to the negroes on the others by the occasional visits
which they paid at night to each other's quarters, or to some
common rendezvous far removed from interruption.

Occasionally Tony and Dinah met. Dan would come up late in the
evening to the house, and a nod to Dinah would be sufficient to
send her flying down the garden to a clump of shrubs, where he
would be waiting for her. At these stolen meetings they were
perfectly happy; for Tony said no word to her of the misery of his
life--how he was always put to the hardest work and beaten on the
smallest pretext, how in fact his life was made so unendurable that
the idea of running away and taking to the swamps was constantly
present to him.

As to making his way north, it did not enter his mind as possible.
Slaves did indeed at times succeed in traveling through the
Northern States and making their way to Canada, but this was only
possible by means of the organization known as the underground
railway, an association consisting of a number of good people who
devoted themselves to the purpose, giving shelter to fugitive
slaves during the day, and then passing them on to the next refuge
during the night. For in the Northern States as well as the
Southern any negro unprovided with papers showing that he was a
free man was liable to be arrested and sent back to the South a
prisoner, large rewards being given to those who arrested them.

As he was returning from one of these interviews with his wife,
Tony was detected by the overseer, who was strolling about round
the slaves' quarters, and was next morning flogged until he became