I saw the wisdom of keeping away from the ship yards, for if Master Hugh pursued me, he would naturally expect to find me looking for work among the calkers.

For a time, every door seemed closed against me.

A sense of my loneliness and helplessness crept over me,{264} and covered me with something bordering on despair.

In the midst of thousands of my fellowmen, and yet a perfect stranger! In the midst of human brothers, and yet more fearful of them than of hungry wolves! I was without home, without friends, without work, without money, and without any definite knowledge of which way to go, or where to look for succor.
Some apology can easily be made for the few slaves who have, after making good their escape, turned back to slavery, preferring the actual rule of their masters, to the life of loneliness, apprehension, hunger, and anxiety, which meets them on their first arrival in a free state.

It is difficult for a freeman to enter into the feelings of such fugitives.
He cannot see things in the same light with the slave, because he does not, and cannot, look from the same point from which the slave does.
"Why do you tremble," he says to the slave "you are in a free state;" but the difficulty is, in realizing that he is in a free state, the slave might reply.