As they had been annoyed two weeks by the various plans of "Master Dan Payne," they concluded the next time he gave them a call to appear more social, and gave their plan to forty or fifty of their friends, who were to lie in ambush near the old barracks, where one of the brothers was to have a chill, and appear too sick to go over the river. But two days passed before the opportunity arrived that enabled them to carry out their plan. When Alfred informed the ex-master of the illness of his brother, of course he must hasten to the sick boy with a nice brandy-sling for the chills, and he purchased a good quantity for them all. While he was handing a glass of sweetened brandy to the sick man, a company of men rushed in and held him, while Alfred and two brothers stripped him of his coat, vest, boots, socks, and pants, and tied him with a rope in the same way the master had tied their mother, when he compelled her to be stripped, and tied her with his own hands, and whipped her until the blood ran to the ground. Alfred and his brothers applied dexterously the slave-whip, which they had provided for the occasion by borrowing a plantation slave-whip kept by Henry Bibb as a reminder of his slave life. Daniel Payne begged heartily for mercy. Alfred replied: "Yes, this is just the way my mother begged for mercy; but you had no mercy for her, and this is to show what she received at your cruel hands." They applied the lash until the forty stripes their mother had received at his hands had been given. Then they unbound him and gave him fifteen minutes to dress and leave Canada, and gave him a quarter to go with, keeping his watch and purse, which contained about forty dollars. He crossed the river within the given time, and sent an agent to call on the authorities, to whom he entered a complaint of being robbed of a gold watch and one hundred dollars, but made no complaint of the whipping. He affected to be too lame "with rheumatism" to return to his Kentucky home for a number of days, in which time the boys returned his watch, but kept the money. Alfred and his brothers said Mr. Payne was as untruthful about the amount of money as he was in calling his old silver watch gold. Suffice it to say, the young men were never after troubled or annoyed by Daniel Payne, of Kentucky. Although it was a course I would never have inaugurated, yet it was largely in human nature to requite the cruelties heaped upon their mother when it was beyond their power to protect her. With very many pleasant remembrances, I left this laborious field of labor for home work, where I spent nearly three years looking after the best interests of my children, and making preparations to reopen Raisin Institute, for the moral, intellectual, and spiritual improvement of our youth. CHAPTER IX. RESCUE OF SLAVES.