This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[54]
passed out of the door, he saw his master coming, and ran full speed.
He had sufficient presence of mind to take a zigzag course, and running through a house occupied by colored people, he succeeded in eluding pursuit.
When Friend Hopper went home, he found him at his house.
He tried to impress upon his mind the peril he would incur by remaining in Philadelphia, and advised him by all means to go to sea. But his wife was strongly attached to him, and so unwilling to consent to this plan, that he concluded to run the risk of staying with her. He remained concealed about a week, and then returned to the house he had previously occupied.
They lived in the second story, and there was a shed under their bed-room window.
Ben placed a ladder under the window, to be ready for escape; but it was so short, that it did not reach the roof of the shed by five or six feet. His wife was an industrious, orderly woman, and kept their rooms as neat as a bee-hive.
The only thing which marred their happiness was the continual dread that man-hunters might pounce upon them, in some unguarded hour, and separate them forever.
About a fortnight after his arrest, they were sitting together in the dusk of the evening, when the door was suddenly burst open, and his master rushed in with a constable.
Ben sprang out of the window, down the ladder, and made his escape.
His master
Boston, J. P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor and Worthington; London; Low and Company, 1854.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.