showing how vain would be any further effort for freedom. Her resolution was taken. She clasped her hands convulsively, and raised them, as she at the same time raised her eyes towards heaven, and begged for that mercy and compassion there, which had been denied her on earth; and then, with a single bound, she vaulted over the railings of the bridge, and sunk for ever beneath the waves of the river!

Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of American Independence, and one of the first statesmen of that country.

Had Clotel escaped from oppression in any other land, in the disguise in which she fled from the Mississippi to Richmond, and reached the United States, no honour within the gift of the American people would have been too good to have been heaped upon the heroic woman. But she was a slave, and therefore out of the pale of their sympathy. They have tears to shed over Greece and Poland; they have an abundance of sympathy for “poor Ireland;" they can furnish a ship of war to convey the Hungarian refugees from a Turkish prison to the “land of the free and home of the brave.” They boast that America is the "cradle of liberty;” if it is, I fear they have rocked the child to death. The body of Clotel was picked up from the bank of the river, where it had been washed by the strong current, a hole dug in the sand, and there deposited, without either inquest being held over it, or religious service being performed. Such was the life and such the death of a woman whose virtues and goodness of heart would have done honour to one in a higher station of life, and who, if she had been born in any other land but that of slavery, would have been honoured and

loved. A few days after the death of Clotel, the following poem appeared in one of the newspapers:

"Now, rest for the wretched! the long day is past,
And night on you prison descendeth at last.
Now look up and bolt! Ha, jailor, look there!
Who flies like a wild bird escaped from the snare?
A woman, a slave—up, out in pursuit,
While linger some gleams of day!

Let thy call ring out!- -now a rabble rout
Is at thy heels—speed away!

"A bold race for freedom!-On, fugitive, on!
Heaven help but the right, and thy freedom is won.
How eager she drinks the free air of the plains;
Every limb, every nerve, every fibre she strains;
From Columbia’s glorious capitol,
Columbia’s daughter flees

To the sanctuary God has given--
The sheltering forest trees.

“Now she treads the Long Bridge—joy lighteth her eye—
Beyond her the dense wood and darkening sky-
Wild hopes thrill her heart as she neareth the shore:
O, despair! there are men fast advancing before!

Shame, shame on their manhood! they hear, they heed
The cry, her flight to stay,

And like demon forms with their outstretched arms,
They wait to seize their prey!

"She pauses, she turns! Ah, will she flee back?
Like wolves, her pursuers howl loud on their track;
She lifteth to Heaven one look of despair-
Her anguish breaks forth in one hurried prayer-
Hark! her jailor‘s yell! like a bloodhound’s bay
On the low night wind it sweeps!

Now, death or the chain! to the stream she turns,
And she leaps! O God, she leaps!

“The dark and the cold, yet merciful wave,
Receives to its bosom the form of the slave:

She rises—earth's scenes on her dim vision gleam,
Yet she struggleth not with the strong rushing stream:
And low are the death-cries her woman‘s heart gives,
As she floats adown the river,

Faint and more faint grows the drowning voice,
And her cries have ceased for ever!

"Now back, jailer. back to thy dungeons, again,
To swing the red lash and rivet the chain!

The form thou would’st fetter—returned to its God;
The universe holdeth no realm of night

More drear than her slavery —

More merciless fiends than here stayed her flight -
Joy! the hunted slave is free!

"That bond-woman‘s corse-let Potomac's proud wave
Go bear it along by our Washington’s grave,
And heave it high up on that hallowed strand,
To tell of the freedom he won for our land.

A weak woman's corse, by freemen chased down;
Hurrah for our country! hurrah!

To freedom she leaped, through drowning and death-
Hurrah for our country! hurrah!”

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE ESCAPE.

"No refuge is found on our unhallowed ground, For the wretched in Slavery‘s manacles bound;

While our star-spangled banner in vain boasts to wave O'er the land cf the free and the home of the brave!"

WE left Mary, the daughter of Clotel, in the capacity of a servant in her own father’s house, where she had been taken by her mistress for the ostensible purpose of plunging her husband into the depths of humiliation. At first the young girl was treated with great severity; but after finding that Horatio Green had lost all feeling for his child, Mrs. Green's own heart became touched for the offspring of her husband, and she became its friend. Mary had grown still more beautiful, and, like most of her sex in that country, was fast coming to maturity.

The arrest of Clotel, while trying to rescue her daughter, did not reach the ears of the latter till her mother had been removed from Richmond to Washington. The mother had passed from time to eternity before the daughter knew that she had been in the neighbourhood. Horatio Green was not in Richmond at the time of Clotel’s arrest; had he been there, it is not probable but he would have made an effort to save her. She was not his slave, and therefore was beyond his power, even had he been there and inclined to aid her. The revolt amongst the slaves had been brought to an end, and most of the insurgents either put to death or sent

out of the state. One, however, remained in prison. He was the slave of Horatio Green, and had been a servant in his master’s dwelling. He, too, could boast that his father was an American statesman, His name was George. His mother had been employed as a servant in one of the principal hotels in Washington, where members of Congress usually put up. After George’s birth his mother was sold to a slave trader, and he to an agent of Mr. Green, the father of Horatio. George was as white as most white persons. No one would suppose that any African blood coursed through his veins. His hair was straight, soft, fine, and light; his eyes blue, nose prominent, lips thin, his head well formed, forehead high and prominent; and he was often taken for a free white person by those who did know him. This made his condition still more intolerable; for one so white seldom ever receives fair treatment at the hands of his fellow slaves; and the whites usually regard such slaves as persons who, if not often flogged, and otherwise ill treated, to remind them of their condition, would soon “forget” that they were slaves, and “think themselves as good as white folks.” George’s opportunities were far greater than most slaves. Being in his master’s house, and waiting on educated white people, he had become very familiar with the English language. He had heard his master and visitors speak of the down-trodden and oppressed Poles; he heard them talk of going to Greece to fight for Grecian liberty, and against the oppressors of that ill-fated people. George, fired with the love of freedom, and zeal for the cause of his enslaved countrymen, joined the insurgents, and with them had been defeated and captured. He was the only one remaining of these unfortunate people, and he would have been put to death with them but for a circumstance that occurred some