When I found myself foiled in my effort to pass through the floor, I turned my attention to the hearth of the room, which I took up, intending to let myself down at that point, and make my escape through a window below, which was covered by a projecting roof. But just as I was about to take away the key-stone of the hearth, I heard the guard cry out, “Corporal o’ de guard, post number fo’,” which arrested my attention, and moving toward the window, discovered in the darkness of the night, that the rain was falling in torrents. Again my ear caught the voice of the guard, who, in his peculiar Southern intonations, was addressing the corporal.
“I’s gittin’ all wet; put me undah dat ar windah, dar.”
So the guard was stationed under the window where I had contemplated making my exit, and all my plans, for the nonce, were frustrated.
Early the next morning Tom came to the door and said:
“Why you don’ didn’t come, massa?”
“Why, Tom, that room below is full of commissary stores.”
“Why, massa, I don’ ought to have told you dat, but I don’ didn’t know it.”
Tom came in, and I exhibited the hole in the floor, and assured him that if the fact of its existence were not concealed, I should be either sent to jail or hung. He looked at it, and fruitful as he was of expedients, soon devised a remedy. He first tacked a piece of carpet over the hole, and afterward, finding that it would yield if trodden upon, constructed a rude seat immediately above it.
This, and other manifestations of intellectual and mechanical aptness, led me into a train of reflection concerning a race so decried and degraded. I asked with Campbell—
“Was man ordained the slave of man to toil,