Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB
[graphic][merged small]

ville in a buggy drawn by two horses, and became the honored guest of the family. Julius was brokenhearted when his father declared that he was too young to be taken to the lecture which Douglass delivered, but he drank in with wide-open eyes and bated breath the tales of slave life which the colored champion of his race related within his hearing. On the morning after the lecture, one of Douglas's horses broke loose, and with rare zeal the boy entered into the chase and capture, feeling that at last opportunity had been given him to make expression of the sympathy which until then he had kept silently within himself. By aiding Douglass, he felt that he had taken a definite step toward freeing the slaves, and he enjoyed to the full the consciousness of his early consecration.

Senator Burrows kept no diaries, but in twenty voluminous scrap-books he pasted clippings, letters, and memoranda from which the biographer has freely drawn. These memorabilia go back to 1860, and continue without a break down to the year of his death. From time to time Burrows refers to his boyhood life, and the following extracts, taken from interviews, letters, and anecdotes, when pieced together afford a picture of the period which is of value and interest beyond their personal association:

"I was born in a log-cabin," Burrows relates, "on

My

the side of a hill in Erie County, Pennsylvania. father built a new house when I was a child which I thought to be remarkably commodious and elegant. When we moved into it with our belongings it seemed entirely too large and oppressively lonely. I went back to look at the old house several years ago, keeping its stately proportions in mind as I had always remembered them; but I could not find it. I saw a weather-beaten little hut of one and a half stories, with three rooms downstairs and an unfinished attic. I was distressed and amazed to learn that it was the imposing palace of my childhood.

"I think that my very earliest ambition was to be a preacher. When not more than five years old I recall distinctly my habit of getting the other children assembled on Sundays, or times when the old folks were gone away, fixing up a kind of pulpit of chairs and the wood-box, and then commanding strict attention while I recited some verses from the family Bible which I knew by heart.

"On one occasion three of us boys thought we would run away from home. The home-leaving was the bitterest time of my life. We went about a mile, and then realized we had no place to sleep and no food to eat. So we turned back and slept in the barn. When we came in to breakfast no one paid any attention to us, there were so many of us that we had not

[graphic][graphic][merged small][merged small][merged small]
« AnteriorContinuar »