pause, then the final count, followed a second later by a gush of flame.
The man dropped, his breast riddled. At the same instant the
thunderstorm that had been gathering broke loose. The boys fled wildly,
believing that Satan himself had arrived to claim the lost soul.

Many such instances happened in a town like that in those days. And
there were events incident to slavery. He saw a slave struck down and
killed with a piece of slag for a trifling offense. He saw an
abolitionist attacked by a mob, and they would have lynched him had not a
Methodist minister defended him on a plea that he must be crazy. He did
not remember, in later years, that he had ever seen a slave auction, but
he added:

"I am suspicious that it is because the thing was a commonplace
spectacle, and not an uncommon or impressive one. I do vividly remember
seeing a dozen black men and women chained together lying in a group on
the pavement, waiting shipment to a Southern slave-market. They had the
saddest faces I ever saw."

It is not surprising that a boy would gather a store of human knowledge
amid such happenings as these. They were wild, disturbing things. They
got into his dreams and made him fearful when he woke in the middle of
the night. He did not then regard them as an education. In some vague
way he set them down as warnings, or punishments, designed to give him a
taste for a better life. He felt that it was his own conscience that
made these things torture him. That was his mother's idea, and he had a
high respect for her moral opinions, also for her courage. Among other
things, he had seen her one day defy a vicious devil of a Corsican--a
common terror in the town-who was chasing his grown daughter with a heavy
rope in his hand, declaring he would wear it out on her. Cautious