Page:Memorials of a Southern Planter.djvu/33

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BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS.
27

seized a piece of rough scantling, which he adjusted to the second-story window that she indicated, and on this he climbed until he reached the window. He got into the room and felt his way to the bed, where the woman had said that her child lay. The bed was empty. Unknown to the mother, the child had been taken out and was in a place of safety. The boy now groped his way to the window. The fire had made such progress that the window-panes were falling in great drops of molten glass. Not a moment was to be lost, and he seized the scantling with both hands and slid to the ground. The liquid glass fell on his hands, and the splinters and nails, of which the scantling was full, lacerated them. The scars left by these wounds were so deep as to be plainly visible during his whole life. The crowd had watched with breathless suspense his climbing into the house, and it was believed that he had gone to certain death. His reappearance at the window was hailed with tumultuous cheers and applause. The police crowded around him, asking his name, and the woman fell on her knees before him to bless him for his efforts in her behalf and to beg to know his name. He refused to give it, being quite embarrassed at finding himself the centre of so much attention, when he had been doing what seemed to him so plain and simple a duty. He got away as fast as he could, and did not even tell his uncle of his adventure. The New York morning papers contained an account of the "heroic action of a young boy who had refused to give his name." It was many years before he mentioned the circumstance to any one.

One cold day, when he was about nineteen years old, he noticed on the ferry-boat, as he was coming from New York to Jersey City, a poor woman, who was shivering in her calico dress. He took off his great-coat and put it around her.

In after-life he amused his friends very much by his stories of a certain Mr.——, who, as some sort of expiation for having killed a negro, built a church, and undertook to gather a congregation and to preach to them. His efforts brought together a number of the