The young men had provided themselves plentifully with rotten eggs,
thinking to pelt me on my way home; but the night was very dark, and the
way led through a tall, dense, shadowy forest, and somehow they mistook
their own father for me, and gave _him_ the eggs. When he got home he
was as slimy and odoriferous as a man need to be; while I was perfectly
clean and sweet.
But I was not to be permitted to escape in this way. During the night
they pulled down the fences of my farm, and gave me other hints, that I
must leave, or do worse. So I sold my farm for what I could get, and
bought another some seventy miles away, near Salem, Columbiana County, a
region occupied chiefly by what, in America, were called
"_Come-outers_"--people who had left the churches and the ministry, and
even separated themselves from civil organizations, resolved to be
subject to no authority but their own wills or their own whims. Among
people so free as those, I thought I should have liberty plenty; but I
soon found that they were so fond of freedom, that they wanted _my_
share as well as their own, and I got into trouble once more. And then I
saw that the greatest brawlers about liberty, when they come to be
tried, are often the most arrant despots and tyrants on the face of the
earth.
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