Anecdotes of public men; by John W. Forney.

DAVID PAUL BROWN. 211
saved about five hundred dollars with which to buy his ransom
-how he started in search of his mother and kindred-how he
reached Philadelphia, where, by having notices read in the colored churches that more than forty years before " two little
boys were kidnapped and carried South," he obtained information in regard to them-how, after traveling sixteen hundred
miles, the first man Peter Still sought advice from was his brother, the author of this very book on the Under-ground Railroad,
whom he had never seen or heard of-how, after this mutual
recognition, the self-ransomed captive was destined again to
suffer the keenest pangs of sorrow for his own wife and children, whom he had left in Alabama in bondage-how, finally,
a brave white man, Seth Conklin, proceeded to Alabama, carried off this wife and children, and was retaken with them, in
Indiana, and perished while he was being carried in irons back
to the South, by leaping from the boat in which they were confined. The volume, containing this and other equally romantic
yet truthful stories, will soon be out, and, my word for it, no
book of the times will be more eagerly read or more profitably
remembered.
[November 12, I871.]
XLV.
DAVID PAUL BROWN, of Philadelphia, has been for half a
century the favorite orator of the American bar. His renown
was national before he was thirty; and as he not only never
sought but resolutely declined office, and rarely practiced in the
courts of other States, his fame is mainly the outgrowth of professional efforts in his native city. He is still living in Philadelphia, in his seventy-seventh year, the most active veteran of
his time. Who can not recall him in the flush of his manhood?