recalling little incidents which show what the pressure must have
been. I have mentioned an escapade of this period, connected with
the last flogging my father gave me, but of which that was only the
secondary cause, determining the moment but not the movement. It was
a matter of conscience at bottom. My mother had, when I was about six
years old, taken a little octoroon girl of three, the illegitimate
daughter of a quadroon in our neighborhood, with the intention
of bringing her up as a servant. The child was quick-witted and
irrepressible, and disputes began between us as soon as she felt at
home. I suppose she must have been inclined to impertinence, for she
had to be whipped, and as at her age no difference of condition was
evident to her, she became a severe trial to my equanimity. Every
outbreak of temper induced by her conduct toward me became occasion
of a period of penitence, for I was taught that such outbreaks were
sinful, and as neither had I the amount of self-control that I needed
to overlook the provocations she gave, nor had she the power of
understanding the position, the transgressions that my conscience had
to bear up under became an intolerable load.

At this juncture came the brutal and as I felt most unmerited flogging
of which I have told the story earlier: this precipitated a decision
which had been slowly forming from my conscientious worries. I
determined to go away from home, and seek a state of life in which I
could maintain my spiritual tranquillity. I discussed the subject with
a playmate of my age, the son of a gardener living near us, and, as
his father had even a stronger propensity to the rod than mine,
we sympathized on that ground and agreed to run away and work our
passages on some ship to a land where we could live in a modified
Robinson Crusoe manner,--not an uninhabited land, but one where we
could earn, by fishing and similar devices, enough to live. I had been