Blake, at these words, left the window, and came and looked at the scar with evident satisfaction. Colonel Hyde, with a lordly air of patronage, held out his hand to Skinner, and said: “Capting, the scar is an honor. Capting, yer hand. I love to meet a high-tone gemmleman, and you’re one. Capting, allow me to shake yer hand.” “With pleasure,” said Biggs, taking the Colonel’s hand and shaking it in his own big, coarsely-seamed flipper, before the Captain had a chance to reach out. The Colonel smiled grimly at Biggs’s playfulness, but said nothing. “Come! it’s time to go,” exclaimed Iverson, looking at his watch. The party rose, and proceeded down Broadway to Charlton’s office. We have already seen what transpired on their arrival. Our business is now with what happened after their departure. Three o’clock struck. The small hand on the dial of Trinity was fast moving toward four; and still Blake paced the floor in Charlton’s office. Every now and then there would be a knock at the door, and Blake, with a menacing shake of his head, would impose silence on the conveyancer, till the applicant for admission, tired of knocking, would go away. Blake’s thoughts were in the condition of a chopping sea where wind and tide are opposing each other. Reflections that reached to the very foundation of human society—questions of abstract right and wrong—were combating old notions adopted on the authority of others, and as yet untested in the cupel of his own conscience. Brought for the first time face to face with the law for the rendition of fugitive slaves,—encountering it in its practical operation,—he found in it a barbarous necessity from which his heart recoiled with horror and disgust. Must he disregard that pleading cry of conscience, that voice of God and Christ in his soul, calling on him to do in righteousness unto others as he would have them do unto him? Could any human enactment exempt him from that paramount obedience? How had he felt dwarfed in another’s presence that day! He had seen a man, and that man a negro, putting forth his manhood in the best way he could to parry the arm of a savage oppression, doubly fiendish in its mockery, coming as it did under the respectable escort of the law. Surely the negro showed himself better worthy of freedom than any white man among his hunters. Would the fellow keep his pledge? Would he come back? Blake now earnestly hoped he would not. Was not any stratagem justifiable in such a case? Should we mind resorting to deception in order to rescue ourselves or another from a madman or a murderer? Why, then, might not Peek violate his written promise, made as it was to men who were trying to rob him of a freedom more precious than life to such a soul as his?