He at last asked his wife to play the piano, while the young daughters danced. I noticed Mammy in an adjoining room, looking in upon the happy scene and in her delight showing her ivory. About ten o’clock, with many warm wishes each for the prosperity of the other, we parted, I to think of the beneficence and beauty of slavery, and my host probably to contemplate his success in commending to my good graces an institution that I had been educated to abhor. But what was the sequel of that evening’s conversation? What light did the immediate future throw back upon it? Was my genial host’s emphatic and repeated declaration that nothing could entice Wash and Mammy from their home verified? The war came on apace. Everything appeared to be out of joint. The most stable relations of life were unexpectedly and strangely upset. Property in slaves grew precarious. And the first slave in St. Louis reported in the papers as having run away was Wash. His master was an officer of a bank. The young men employed there, to whom he had declared as he did to me that nothing could induce Wash to leave him, asked him if he intended to catch his runaway slave and bring him back. He replied, “No, let him go, I never liked to have him around anyway; I am glad that he has gone.” While this quite flatly contradicted his previous utterances, under the circumstances it was wisest not to attempt to apprehend his fleeing chattel. But for many weeks, almost every day, some one in the bank would exasperatingly ask him, “How is Wash?” But did Mammy, so full of affection and so delighted with her home, prove true to her master and mistress? About two weeks after Wash’s departure, she left without giving notice to the family. She slept in the second story of the house. In the night she made up a budget for herself, and threw it out into the yard. She then made a rope of her bed-clothes, fastened one end of it to her bedstead, and threw the other out of the window. Her improvised rope reached nearly to the ground. She climbed down the rope, took up her budget and departed. That household never saw that devoted mammy again. Such incidents are representative of hundreds of others at that time. To be sure many of the slaves were true to their masters and remained with their families to the close of the war; but those who wished to leave did so, and the fugitive slave law, having suddenly become a dead letter, could no longer be invoked to catch them.