I was four years old when I learned that my father combined the two functions of preaching in a New England college town and ticket-agency on the Underground Railroad. Four years old has a sort of literal mindedness about it. Most little boys that I knew had an idea that professors of religion and professors in college were the same, and that a real Christian always had to wear black and speak Greek. So I could be pardoned for going down cellar and watching behind old hogsheads by the hour to see where the cars came in. A year after that I casually saw my first passenger, but regretted not also to have seen whether he came up by the coal-bin or the meat-safe. His name was Isidore Smith; so, to protect him from Smith, my father, being a conscientious man, baptized him into a liberty to say that his name was John Peterson. I held the blue bowl which served for font. To this day I feel a sort of semi-accountability for John Peterson. I have asked after him every time I have crossed the Suspension Bridge since I grew up. In holding that baptismal bowl I suppose I am, in a sense, his godfather. Half a godfather is better than none, and in spite of my size I was a very earnest one. There are few godchildren for whom I should have had to renounce fewer sins than for thee, brave John Peterson! John Peterson had been baptized before. No sprinkling that, but an immersion in hell! He had to strip to show it to us. All down his back were welts in which my father might lay his finger; and one gash healed with a scar into which I could put my small, boyish fist. The former were made by the whip and branding-irons of a Virginia planter,--the latter by the teeth of his bloodhounds. When I saw that black back, I cried; and my father might have chosen the place to baptize in, even as John Baptist did AEnon, "because there was much water there." John stayed with us three or four weeks and then got moody. Nobody in the town twitted him as a runaway. He was inexhaustibly strong in health, and never tired of doing us service as gardener, porter, errand-boy, and, on occasion, cook. In few places could his hard-won freedom be less imperilled than with us. At last the secret of his melancholy came out. He burst into tears, one morning, as he stood with the fresh-polished boots at the door of my father's study, and sobbed,-- "Massa, I's got to go an' fetch dat yer gal 'n' little Pompey, 'r I's be done dead afore de yeah's out!" As always, a woman in the case!