Nancy, were in a similar hut near by during the first day, but were conveyed in a carriage to a safe place in Baltimore, Monday evening, arriving there about eight o’clock. These were the first two stations on the route, and here they all remained until the aforesaid article appeared in the Washington paper, and Col. H. had called in his hounds, both biped and quadruped, when, the excitement having subsided, their further progress was comparatively easy.
Before pursuing the thread of their story beyond this point, I must go back a few days and commence the narrative as it was related at my own fireside by one of the parties, the aforesaid Jo, whom I chanced to meet in this village and made a bargain with to go to school, paying for his board by doing chores. Jo was very intelligent, but said his uncle Harry was a “heap” smarter than he was, and led the party whenever they ran their own train.
Jo worked on the plantation “making tobacco,” as he termed it, in the summer, and after he was sixteen years old, he was hired out as waiter in a hotel in Washington every winter. He used to boast of standing behind Daniel Webster’s chair, and waiting on him at the table, and that his wife, Mary, had the care of his rooms. They had now been married about four years. She lived, when not in service at the hotel, with the Judson family in the city. Judson held her as a slave, though his father told her, that by his will, she would, at his death, be free. When Jo was not employed in the city, he was allowed to go to church, and to visit his wife on Sunday once in two weeks. When the gout got an extra twist on the old Colonel’s toes, he would be cross and refuse to give him a pass. But Jo had a true friend in the old man’s daughter, whose love letters he carried both ways, and never betrayed her secrets. She did the old man’s
