MAKE FREE: THE STORY OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.

By William Breyfogle '28. New York: Lippincott,1958. 287 pp. $4.50.

Using the sparse surviving records, contemporaneously fashioned or recollected by the participants in later, safer times, William Breyfogle vividly reconstructs the story of the Underground Railroad as it picked its way precariously over mercurial routes through the turbulent decades which preceded the Civil War. These half-remembered, halfverified paths the author peoples again with forgotten heroes, white and black, who made their way in silence (paragoric for the children).

Woven among the accounts of the individuals who conducted or traveled the Underground are discerning descriptions of the way of life, Northern and Southern, which produced the climate of the times. His perceptive analyses of the forces, - political, social, and moral, - that created but far transcended the Underground, make the reading of Mr. Breyfogle's books' an adventure in ideas as well as in actions.

Make Free (the title is derived from the Negroes' common term- for escaping) deals only with events and conditions in the America of a century ago and longer. But it has contemporary overtones that will not be lost upon any reader sensitive to the intricate and deeply disturbing forces at work in the United States of 1958 while the most recent chapter is being written in the racial drama that has torn this land in one fashion or another for three hundred years.

The personal tragedy .of the author - Bill Breyfogle died almost instantly from the sting of a bee just before Make Free was published - adds great poignancy to the experience of reading his last book. So fine a work it is that his friends - among whom this reviewer is proud to count himself - will find warm satisfaction in the special kind of immortality that it assures for him.