Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/268

 lands above, to which I had fled with Cassy, and where, in the hopefulness and thoughtlessness of youth, runaways as we were, we had passed some weeks of happy privacy, ending, indeed, in heavy tribulation. The great house had now completely fallen, and was one undistinguishable heap of ruins; but the little brick dairy, near the run below, was very much in the same condition as when we had found in it a temporary shelter. As I sat down beneath one of the great trees by which it was shaded, how all the past came rushing up before me!

After an hour or two of reverie, 1 made my way through the woods to Spring Meadow, where I found another similar scene of desolation. The garden, where I had spent so many thoughtless hours in childish sports with master James, was now overgrown with persimmons, which choked and overshadowed the few remaining shrubberies. Yet the old garden walks might be distinctly traced in several places, and there were considerable remnants of an old summer house, where we had sat hour after hour, hid away from his brother William, and studying master. James's lessons together. Adjoining the garden was the family burying-ground, and over master James's grave I dropped a tear. My mother's grave I had to seek in another part of the plantation. What stranger, lighting on the spot, could have now distinguished, from any difference in the grass and trees that waved above them, or in the wild aspect around of nature regaining her dominion, in which spot the master rested, and in which the slave? These silent graves, already half obliterated, no less than the fast-mouldering ruins of what had once been the seat of opulence and plenty, seemed plainly to testify, that not by such means were families to be perpetuated, prosperous communities to be founded, or permanent triumphs over nature secured.