He hastened to Ellicottville and found that Jo had already realized $100. A meeting was immediately called in an office in the village, at which were present Judge Chamberlin, of Randolph, E. S. Coleman, of Dunkirk, and several other gentlemen. The letter was read, and at the suggestion of the Judge a note for two hundred dollars was drawn and signed by ten of them, with the understanding that they were to share equally in the payment of any deficit after Jo had done his best. The money was advanced by Mr. Coleman, and one of the party drove fifty miles to Buffalo, through a pelting storm, purchased a draft, forwarded it to Mr. Coleman, and before the “days of grace” had expired Mary and her child were duly registered and delivered as free people. Meanwhile Jo’s story had gotten into the papers of Western New York, and he had calls from various places to lecture; indeed, he had become quite a local lion, and so successful that early in March when word came that Mary and the child had reached Utica, he was the possesser of $195. This he deposited in the hands of Mr. Pettit who returned him $30 and told him to go and make provision for his wife and child, and pay the balance of the note when he could. Though he had walked that day from Buffalo, a distance of nearly thirty miles, Jo immediately returned, and early the next day, in the home of a leading Abolitionist in Utica there was a regular “Hal’lujer; Bress de Lor’, for de Lor’ will bress his people,” time when Jo and Mary met after their seemingly hopeless separation. VII. Ten years and more had passed; the Ellicottville note had been long settled; Jo had laid aside his mission as a lecturer and gone into business in Syracuse, N. Y., where he owned a pleasant home and had a family of intelligent children attending the public school; New York State, like the country at large, had been convulsed over the slavery question, and the city of his adoption had become a town of intensely Abolition sentiment. As the outgrowth of the slavery agitation there had come the enactment of the “Fugitive Slave Law,” as it was popularly, or rather unpopularly called, by means of which the South thought to render imperative the rendition of their runaway slaves. But they had counted without their host. Though successful in cracking their whips over the heads of Northern law-makers in the Capitol, the great mass of the people of the free states, no matter what their political affiliations, felt outraged at the idea of being converted into a set of legally constituted slave-hunters. Few places more excited the ire of the chivalry than Syracuse, and the threat was defiantly made that if another anti-slavery convention was held in the city it should be enlivened by the seizure of a fugitive of whom a test case could be made.