disappeared south into the woods. One of our best guides was with him, and before the next morning delivered him to Mr. Welles, in Leon. A few days after he was placed in the hands of a Quaker friend, named Hathaway, in Collins, Erie Co. In the meantime the hunter was spying around Forestville. The Quaker friend had a house in the woods, where during the season he made maple sugar, and there Robert stayed until the hunters withdrew, when he went to Madison Co. He tried hard to learn to read and write, and succeeded partially, though he made slow progress. He used to say that when slavery was abolished, he would go back to Mississippi and preach to the colored people, and often expressed a wish to go to school and prepare himself for mission work. He came back to Chautauqua Co. a year or two before the war, and worked at chopping wood one winter. He had heard nothing from his old home in many years, yet his faith was unshaken that he should go back a free man, and preach to the colored people there in the far south. When I last saw him, he spoke of going to the negro settlen: nt in Canada as soon as he could finish his job, since which I have not heard from him.
The few incidents related in these sketches, much from memory, aided by very limited search among memoranda, read so tamely compared with the interest and excitement that was felt at the time, that they seem hardly worth relating, yet the liberation of a single human being from so wicked and loathsome a degradation as that of American slavery, is worth more than all the sacrifice it ever cost. But it should not be supposed that the rescue of here and there an individual from bondage was the sole object proposed to be accomplished by the establishment of the U. G. R. R. and I think that when its history shall be understood, it will be known
