his duty to run errands and take care of a little white boy, Tommy
Auld, the son of his mistress for the time being, Mrs. Sophia Auld.
Mrs. Auld was of a religious turn of mind; and, from hearing her
reading the Bible aloud frequently, curiosity prompted the boy to ask
her to teach him to read. She complied, and found him an apt pupil,
until her husband learned of her unlawful and dangerous conduct, and
put an end to the instruction. But the evil was already done, and the
seed thus sown brought forth fruit in the after career of the orator
and leader of men. The mere fact that his master wished to prevent his
learning made him all the more eager to acquire knowledge. In after
years, even when most bitter in his denunciation of the palpable evils
of slavery, Douglass always acknowledged the debt he owed to this good
lady who innocently broke the laws and at the same time broke the
chains that held a mind in bondage.

Douglass lived in the family of Hugh Auld at Baltimore for seven
years. During this time the achievement that had the greatest
influence upon his future was his learning to read and write. His
mistress had given him a start. His own efforts gained the rest. He
carried in his pocket a blue-backed _Webster's Spelling Book_, and, as
occasion offered, induced his young white playmates, by the bribes
of childhood, to give him lessons in spelling. When he was about
thirteen, he began to feel deeply the moral yoke of slavery and to
seek for knowledge of the means to escape it. One book seems to have
had a marked influence upon his life at this epoch. He obtained,
somehow, a copy of _The Columbian Orator_, containing some of the
choicest masterpieces of English oratory, in which he saw liberty
praised and oppression condemned; and the glowing periods of Pitt and
Fox and Sheridan and our own Patrick Henry stirred to life in the
heart of this slave boy the genius for oratory which did not burst