his own counsel, took his own course, and concealed, fed, and forwarded hundreds that even the anti-slavery people knew nothing of. He kept a horse and wagon, and took them himself to William Jackson, Quakertown, Jonathan McGill, Solebury, and William H. Johnson, Buckingham, all in Bucks county. He entertained abolition speakers after the passage of the penal slave law, when they were refused admittance to the hotels.

One evening when Garrison, Burleigh and several others were at his place, Samuel Jamison who owned a large manufacturing establishment adjoining, came in and informed him of a conversation he had just overheard in a small assemblage of men, concerning a plot which was being laid to burn his house if he did not dismiss his guests.

"Tell them to burn it," said Paxson, "and scatter the ashes to the four winds: I'm a free man."

A few days after the Christiana riot, Parker, Pinkney and Johnson, an account of whom is given in the description of the tragedy, and the narrative of Isaac and Dinah Mendenhall, came on foot in the night to Norristown, accompanied by another person whose name is not known. Dr. William Corson announced their arrival to John Augusta. The four men were concealed in a lot of shavings under a carpenter shop which stood three feet above ground on Church street, near Airy. There they remained four days, and were fed with food passed to them upon an oven-peal across a four-foot alley from a frame house in which Samuel Lewis, a colored man, lived. During this time the United States Marshal's detectives were watching every part of the town. On the fourth day a meeting was held by a

few trusted friends in the office of Lawrence E. Corson, Esq., to devise means for their escape. Dr. Paxson proposed engaging five wagons for that evening, four to be sent in different directions as decoys to lead off the vigilant detectives. The plan was adopted, and the wagons and teams were engaged of Jacob Bodey, whose sympathies were known to be in favor of fugitives. But he would accept no pay, saying he would do so much as his share. The first was sent up the turnpike road and shortly after, the second was sent down that road; another was sent across the bridge toward West Chester, and the fourth out the State road toward Downingtown. The attention of the alert officers being now attracted in these directions, the men after having shaved, and otherwise changed their personal appearance, walked from the carpenter shop to Chestnut street and down Chestnut to the house of William Lewis, colored, where the fifth wagon which was to go directly through the town and up the Mill creek road was waiting for them.

Dr. Paxson was there also, and saw the men with William Lewis, colored, as their driver start safely for Quakertown. Lewis was a little tremulous with fear at the perilous undertaking, which, with the haste, somewhat confused him at the start. On the road he became bewildered, and went several miles out of the way, which gave Parker the impression that he was partly intoxicated-a condition in which Lewis never was known to be. From Quakertown they journeyed to Canada, traveling part of the way on foot and part by public conveyance.

On the following day the United States Marshal was

informed that they had left Norristown and were out of his reach. Officers were at once despatched to Quakertown, but the Underground Railroad there disappeared from their view, and its passengers could be tracked no further.

At the close of the war, Judge Smyser, of Norristown, was returning on a train from Philadelphia, and seeing Dr. Paxson in the same car called out to him, "Paxson, is that you? I was at an entertainment last night, and some of the party said I was as great a radical as you are. I replied, 'I thank God that I am! But," he continued, "there was a time when, had you been convicted under the Fugitive Slave Law, I would have given you the extent of the penalty; for I looked upon you as one of the most dangerous men in the community, on account of your utter disregard for that law."

On Dr. Paxson's return home one afternoon in 1846 he saw on his back porch a very black, gray-haired woman, about sixty years of age; also a mulatto woman about thirty, and a small, very fair child, with flaxen. hair, of about six or seven summers. The old woman was conversing with Parker Pilsbury. Her cultivated thought and remarkable gift of language excited their interest and attention. On questioning her they found that she, her daughter and granddaughter, were all slaves. Paxson interrogated her relative to their escape. She stated that they had traveled through Maryland on foot. by night, and during the day they crawled under cornshocks or hid under leaves in the woods; their principal food being roots and corn for many days. He said to her, "Did you not know that you were running a great risk of being caught and taken back, tortured with the

K*

lash and sold upon the auction block, and separated from your child and grandchild?"

She answered "Yes," and the tears rolled down her cheeks; "but I believed that God would help those who tried to help themselves; and with confidence in that power I started out, and it has brought me here. And may God be praised!"

"Now tell me," said Paxson, "what induced you to make this effort."

Rising to her feet, and turning deliberately toward her child, with utterance choked by emotion, she said, "See you not, marked upon her features, my own pollution that the white man has stamped there! See you not upon this grandchild, with its flaxen hair and florid face the pollution of a fiendish nature over her! It was to save that grandchild from the terrible pollution which slavery sways over all whom it dare call a slave; it was to save that fair and beautiful creature from a life of shame that I dared, and have accomplished what I did; and there shall ever go forth from my innermost nature a feeling of gratitude that I have her thus spared."

Dr. Paxson is now residing in Philadelphia. With an active temperament, a good constitution and good health, he possesses mentally and physically the vigor and elasticity of his early manhood, when he displayed earnestness of purpose and determination of will to dare and do for the right.