“I travels on and comes to a tavern, and got some breakfast of fresh salmon, and had a talk with the landlord’s darter, and she was half Ingen, for her father had married an Ingen woman; and while I was there, up come four big Ingens arter whiskey, and they had no money, and so they left a bunch of skins in pawn till they come back. So I paid him thirty-seven and a half cents and come on. The next time I stopped at a cake and beer shop, and I told the old woman sich a pitiful story, that she gin me all I’d bought and a card of gingerbread to boot, and I come on rejoicin’. They was Yankee folks, and, say what you will, the Yankee folks are fine fellers where ever you meet ’em.
“Next place I passed was Utica, which was quite a _thrifty little place_; but I didn’t stop there; and on a little I got a ride with a teamster down twenty miles, to a place about six miles west of Little Falls, and there I put up with a man, and he hired me to help him work nine days and a half, and gin me a dollar a day, and paid me the silver, and he owned a black boy by the name of Toney. We called him Tone, and they did abuse him bad enough, poor feller! he was all scars from head to foot, and I slept with him, and he showed me where they’d cut him to pieces with a cat-o’-nine-tails. And it did seem, to look at him, as though he must have been cut up into mince meat, almost!! ☜ !!
“Well, I left him, and got down about two miles on my journey, and there lay a Durham boat, aground in the Mohawk River; and a man aboard hollered to me, to come down, and he axed me if I didn’t want to _work my passage down to Snackady_. I says, ‘_yis, if you’ll pay me for it_!!’ You see I felt very independent jist now, for I begun to feel my oats a leetle; and so he agreed to give me twenty shillin’s if I would, and so I agreed tu, and went aboard, and glad enough tu of sich a fat chance of gittin’ along.
“We come to ‘the Falls,’ and they was a great curiosity I tell ye; and we got our boat down ’em, through a canal dug round ’em by five or six locks. Oh! them falls was a fine sight—the water a thunderin’ along all foam. Well, we had good times a goin’ down, and come to Snackady, the man wanted to hire me to go trips with him up and down from Utica, and offered me ten dollars a trip. So we got a load of dry goods and groceries, and goes back for Utica, and gits there Saturday night. The captain of the boat was John Munson, and I made three trips with him, and calculated to have made the fourth, but somethin’ turned up that warn’t so agreeable. I stayed there Sunday, and Sunday evenin’ about seven o’clock, I goes up on the hill with one of the hands, to see some of our colour, and gits back arter a roustin’ time about ten o’clock, and as soon as I enters the house, Mrs. Munson says, ‘why lord-a-massa Peter, _your master has been here arter you_, and what shall we do?’ And I was so thunderstruck, I didn’t know what to say, or do. And says she, ‘you must make your escape the best way you can.’