Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/319

Rh forbids, under a heavy punishment, the instruction of a slave in reading and writing. And when I did gain admittance into this secret chamber I found in a wretched dark hole only half-a-dozen poor children, some with an aspect that testified the greatest stupidity and mere animal life. They had evidently been brought hither as an attempt to humanise them.

Magnolia Cemetery is a new, noble, and magnificent burial-place, and an honour to Charleston. It is situated by the sea, the pure, refreshing breezes of which blow over it with invigorating life. Three sides have a background of magnolia and cedar forest, and on the fourth, lies the blue sea. The ground is flat but not swampy, and canals have been dug to bring in the river and sea-water, so as to form small islands and promontories within the vast burial-ground. Beautiful groups of southern trees stand here and there. The manner in which the people of America provide resting-places for their dead, foretells for them a long life on earth.

I saw in this new burial-place only two monuments, but they had each of them so peculiar and so dissimilar a history that I must relate them to you in few words.

The one marks the grave of a young girl. She was her mother's only child. It one day happened that she touched her eye with her hand after having just gathered the poisonous flower called here Night-shade (Solanun nigrum), which has a pretty, pale yellow flower, in form like that of our potato blossom,—and the eye became thereby poisoned. It became enlarged and deformed; and this enlargement, and the suffering which attended it, undermined the young girl's life. She withered away, but beautifully and piously. Her sufferings and her patience made her an object of general love. She and her mother converted the path to the grave, by the strength of religion, into a pathway of light; the Night-shade had