This was the first outbreak of a feeling which influenced his whole life. He began his work early. At fifteen years of age he was the means of enabling a slave—who had been kidnapped near Baltimore and brought into North Carolina—to escape from the slave-dealer’s gang. He was also often of service to runaway slaves, who used to conceal themselves in the daytime in the woods and thickets near his father’s house at New Garden, by going out to them with a small store of provisions, which he distributed to those he found there. In 1826 Levi Coffin removed to Newport, Indiana, where he took a shop and began business. He was soon a prosperous man; and ten years after he was able to set up a large oil-factory. His place in Newport soon became one of the ‘stations’ of the Underground Railroad. This was a secret organisation for facilitating the escape of slaves from the Southern States to Canada. It was neither planned nor organised by any one man; it had grown up gradually, to supply a want felt by the Abolitionist party. A slave escaped from a plantation would without it have no means of travelling rapidly, of obtaining relief, or of finding friends to conceal him, and his hope of safety would depend only upon a series of lucky chances and accidents. Gradually, however, along the routes by which the slaves usually escaped certain houses came to be known as those to which the fugitives could safely apply for assistance. These routes were in the secret language of the U. G. R. R. (Underground Railroad) known as lines, and the houses were called ‘stations.’ In course of time the lines were so well organised that in every town along the route there was a director who had at his command a number of hiding-places for slaves, funds collected for their relief, wagons for passing them on by night to the next station, and means of acquiring information as to any pursuit that might be attempted.