Begin with him when, a little slave-child, he lay down on his rude pallet, and that slave-mother, from a plantation twelve miles away, availed herself of the privilege granted grudgingly, of travelling the whole distance, after the day’s work, (on peril of the lash, unless back again by sunrise to her task,) that she might lie there by his side, and sing him with her low sweet song to sleep. “I do not recollect,” says he, “of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I awaked, she was gone.” How touching the love of that dark-browed bondwoman for her boy! How precious must the memory of that dim but sweet remembrance be to him, who though once a vassal, bound and scourged, and still a Helot, proscribed and wronged, may not be robbed of this dear token that he, too, _had once a mother_! Her low sad lullaby yet warps his life’s dark woof--for she watches over his pathway now with spirit-eyes, and still keeps singing on in his heart, and nursing his courage and his patience. Follow him through all the tempestuous experience of his bondage. His lashings, his longings, his perseverance in possessing himself of the key of knowledge, which, after all, only unlocked to him the fatal secret that he was a slave, a thing to be bought and sold like oxen. Imagine the tumult of his soul, as standing by the broad Chesapeake, he watched the receding vessels, “while they flew on their white wings before the breeze, and apostrophized them as animated by the living spirit of freedom;”[T] or when reading in a stray copy of the old “Columbian Orator,” (verily, all our school-books must be expurgated of the incendiary “perilous stuff” in which they abound,) the “Dialogue between a Master and his Slave,” and Sheridan’s great speech on Catholic Emancipation.[U] See to what heroic resistance his proud heart had swollen, when he turned outright upon his tormentor--pious Mr. Corey, the “nigger-breaker”--and inflicted condign retribution on his heartless ribs; “after which,” says he, significantly, “I was never whipped again; _I had several fights_, but was never whipped.” Attend him in his exodus from our republican Egypt. Witness his struggles with poverty; his vain attempts to find employment at his trade, as a colored man, in the _free_ North. Behold him at last emerging from his obscurity at the Anti-slavery Convention in Nantucket. Somebody, who is aware of his extraordinary natural intelligence, invites him to speak. Tremblingly he consents. “As soon as he had taken his seat,” said Mr. Garrison, after describing the tremendous effect of his remarks upon the audience, “filled with hope and admiration, I rose and declared that Patrick Henry, of revolutionary fame, never made a speech more eloquent in the cause of liberty, than the one we had just listened to from the hunted fugitive.”