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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 309

device was good, but it did not succeed. Glancing around the room, I saw in
an instant the lady who was a child twenty-five years before, and the wife
and mother now. Satisfied of this, I said, "Mr. Sears, if you will allow me, I
will select Miss Amanda from this company." I started towards her, and she,
seeing that I recognized her, bounded to me with joy in every feature, and
expressed her great happiness at seeing me. All thought of slavery, color, or
what might seem to belong to the dignity of her position vanished, and the
meeting was as the meeting of friends long separated, yet still present in each
other's memory and affection.

Amanda made haste to tell me that she agreed with me about slavery, and
that she had freed all her slaves as they had become of age. She brought her
children to me, and I took them in my arms, with sensations which I could not
if I would stop here to describe. One explanation of the feeling of this lady
towards me was, that her mother, who died when she was yet a tender child,
had been briefly described by me in a little "Narrative" of my life, published
many years before our meeting, and when I could have had no motive but the
highest for what I said of her. She had read my story, and learned something
of the amiable qualities of her mother through me. She also recollected that as
I had had trials as a slave, she had had her trials under the care of a stepmother,
and that when she was harshly spoken to by her father's second wife she could
always read in my dark face the sympathy of one who had often received kind
words from the lips of her beloved mother. Mrs. Sears died three years ago in
Baltimore, but she did not depart without calling me to her bedside, that I
might tell her as much as I could about her mother, whom she was firm in the
faith that she should meet in another and better world. She especially wished
me to describe to her the personal appearance of her mother, and desired to
know if any of her own children then present resembled her. I told her that the
young lady standing in the corner of the room was the image of her mother in
form and features. She looked at her daughter and said. "Her name is
Lucretia after my mother." After telling me that her life had been a happy
one, and thanking me for coming to see her on her death-bed, she said she was
ready to die. We parted to meet no more in life. The interview touched me
deeply, and was, I could not help thinking, a strange one - another proof that
"Truth is often stranger than Fiction."

If any reader of this part or my life shall see in it the evidence of a want
of manly resentment for wrongs inflicted upon myself and race by slavery,
and by the ancestors of this lady, so it must be. No man can be stronger than
nature, one touch of which, we are told, makes all the world akin. I esteem
myself a good, persistent hater of injustice and oppression, but my resent-