Elizur Wright, a well-known Abolitionist, editor of the _Chronotype,_ was indicted in the United States Court for aiding in the rescue of Shadrach. While the hearing before Geo. T. Curtis on the proceedings for the rendition of Shadrach was going on, a large number of men, chiefly negroes, made their way into the court-room by one door, swept through, taking the fugitive along with them, and out at the other, leaving the indignant Commissioner to telegraph to Mr. Webster in Washington that he thought it was a case of levying war. I went into the court-room during the trial of Mr. Wright, and saw seated in the front row of the jury, wearing a face of intense gravity, my old friend Francis Bigelow, always spoken of in Concord as "Mr. Bigelow, the blacksmith." He was a Free Soiler and his wife a Garrison Abolitionist. His house was a station on the underground railroad where fugitive slaves were harbored on their way to Canada. Shadrach had been put into a buggy and driven out as far as Concord, and kept over night by Bigelow at his house, and sent on his way toward the North Star the next morning. Richard H. Dana, who was counsel for Elizur Wright, asked Judge Hoar what sort of man Bigelow was. To which the Judge replied: "He is a thoroughly honest man, and will decide the case according to the law and the evidence as he believes them to be. But I think it will take a good deal of evidence to convince him that one man owns another." It is not, perhaps, pertinent to my personal recollections but it may be worth while to tell my readers that Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and some others were indicted afterward for participation in an intended rescue of Anthony Burns, another fugitive slave. The indictment was quashed by Judge Curtis, who had probably got pretty sick of the whole thing. But Parker, while in jail awaiting trial, prepared a defence, which is printed, and which is one of the most marvellous examples of scathing and burning denunciation to be found in all literature. I commend it to young men as worth their study.