“O sir!” he said, with great earnestness, “she is a slave. Every one in slavery longs to be free. I am sure she would rather suffer a great deal as a free woman than to live any longer, however comfortably, as a slave.” “Yes,” I replied, with all apparent want of sympathy, “but it will cost you all the money you have saved, and I fear much more, to buy her and get her brought on to you here, so that you may then be too poor to make her comfortable. But your three hundred dollars will enable you to increase in many ways the comfort of your wife and children. That sum will go far towards the purchase of a nice little home for them. Now, do you not owe them quite as much as you do your mother?” “My wife,” he exclaimed, “is just as anxious as I am to get mother out of slavery. She is willing to work as hard as I will to make mother comfortable after we get her here. I am sure we shall not let mother suffer for anything she may need in her old age. Do, sir, help us get her here, and you shall see what we will do for her.” Repressing my feelings as much as possible, I said once more: “But, my good fellow, your mother is so old she can live but a little while after you have spent your all and more to get her here. Very likely the excitement and the fatigue of the journey and the change of the climate will kill her very soon.” With the deepest emotion and in a most subdued manner, he replied, “No matter if it does,--buy her, bring her here, and _let her die free_.” This was irresistible. I seized his hand. “Sanford, you must not think me as unsympathizing and cold as I have appeared. I have been trying you, proving you. I am satisfied that you know the value of liberty, that you hold it above all price. Be assured I will do all in my power to help you to accomplish your generous, your pious purpose. Nothing will give me more heartfelt satisfaction than to be instrumental in procuring the release of your mother and presenting her to you a free woman.” The sequel to my story is sad, but most instructive. It will show how demoralizing, dehumanizing it has been and must be to hold human beings, fellow-men, as property, chattels; that, as Cowper wrote long ago, “it were better to be a slave and wear the chains, than to fasten them on another.” How to compass the purpose which had thus been so forcibly fixed in my heart required some device. It would not have done for Sanford himself to have gone for his mother. That would have been like going into the den of an angry tiger. No sin that a slave could commit was so unpardonable then, in the estimation of a slaveholder, as running away. I did not, until five years afterwards, become acquainted with that remarkable woman, _Harriet Tubman_, or I might have engaged her services in the assurance that she would have brought off the old woman without _paying_ for what belonged to her by an inalienable right,--_her liberty_.