into the Southern army as a captain, and took Thomas, then a boy in his teens, to wait upon him.
He followed the fortunes of his owner for over a year, but on the retreat of the rebel army after their defeat at Antietam, concluded to try life as his own master. Slipping into the Union lines, he hired out as an officer's servant, at first getting but $7 a month. But on two or three occasions he narrowly escaped capture by the rebels, and as they were wont to treat fugitive slaves who fell into their hands under such circumstances even worse than they did their hated "Yankee" prisoners, he concluded, after the battle of Gettysburg, to leave the army and settle down in the North.
He was intensely desirous of learning to read and write, and he was told that in Northern communities he would find an opportunity to get an education. Going to the city of Pittsburgh, he found employment, first as an hotel porter, and afterward as a waiter in a restaurant. He sought out a night-school, and began attending it. But he had no friends to counsel and help him, and his work so interfered with any attempt to attend school, or even to study by himself, that he made very slow progress. For three or four years his duties in the restaurant kept him busy till nearly midnight six evenings out of every week. But no pauper ever looked more covetously upon the possessions of a millionaire than he, a man grown, did upon the advantages of the children whom he met carrying their slates and readers to and from school.
He heard nothing from his father's family for six
