While the hearing before Geo.

T.Curtis on the proceedings for the rendition of Shadrach was going on, a large number of men, chiefly negroes, made their way into the court-room by one door, swept through, taking the fugitive along with them, and out at the other, leaving the indignant Commissioner to telegraph to Mr.Webster in Washington that he thought it was a case of levying war.

I went into the court-room during the trial of Mr.Wright, and saw seated in the front row of the jury, wearing a face of intense gravity, my old friend Francis Bigelow, always spoken of in Concord as "Mr.Bigelow, the blacksmith." He was a Free Soiler and his wife a Garrison Abolitionist.

His house was a station on the underground railroad where fugitive slaves were harbored on their way to Canada.

Shadrach had been put into a buggy and driven out as far as Concord, and kept over night by Bigelow at his house, and sent on his way toward the North Star the next morning.