Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/541

CHAPTER XVI.

"TIME MAKES ALL THINGS EVEN."

Return to the "old master"—A last interview—Captain Auld's admission, "had I been in your place I should have done as you did"—Speech at Easton—The old jail there—Invited to a sail on the revenue cutter Guthrie—Hon. John L. Thomas—Visit to the old plantation—Home of Colonel Lloyd—Kind reception and attentions—Familiar Scenes—Old memories—Burial ground—Hospitality—Gracious reception from Mrs. Buchanan—A little girl's floral gift—A promise of a "good time coming"—Speech at Harper's Ferry, Decoration day, 1881—Storer College—Hon. A. J. Hunter.

THE leading incidents to which it is my purpose to call attention and make prominent in the present chapter will, I think, address the imagination of the reader with peculiar and poetic force, and might well enough be dramatized for the stage. They certainly afford another striking illustration of the trite saying that "truth is stranger than fiction."

The first of these events occurred four years ago, when, after a period of more than forty years, I visited and had an interview with Captain Thomas Auld at St. Michaels, Talbot county, Maryland. It will be remembered by those who have followed the thread of my story that St. Michaels was at one time the place of my home and the scene of some of my saddest experiences of slave life, and that I left there, or rather was compelled to leave there, because it was believed that I had written passes for several slaves to enable them to escape from slavery, and that prominent slaveholders in that neighborhood had, for this alleged offense, threatened to shoot me on sight, and to prevent the execution of this threat my master had sent me to Baltimore.

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