wondered why those fair children had laid down under the myrtle.
I fancied them with the fringed eyelids drooping over the cheeks, and the
velvet hue still there. How much did I know of death? As little as of life!

Time passed with me, and I saw the sorrows of others. Sometimes I thought
of the myrtle-covered graves, and the children that slept beneath. Oh! how
quiet they must be, they utter no cry, they shed no tears.

Time passed, and an angel slept in my bosom, close to my heart. Need I say
that I was happy when she nestled there? that her voice was music to my
soul, and her smile the very presence of beauty? Need I say it was joy when
she called me, Mother? Then I lived for the present; all the sorrow that I
had seen around me, was forgotten.

God called that angel to her native heaven, and I wept. Now was the mystery
of the myrtle-covered graves open before my sight. I had seen the going
forth of a little life that was part of my own, I remembered the hard sighs
that convulsed that infant breast. I knew that the grave was meant to hide
from us, silence and pallor, desolation and decay. I was in the world, no
longer a garden of flowers, where I sought from under the myrtle for the
bright eyes and the velvet cheeks. I was in the world, and death was there
too; it was by my side. I gave my darling to the earth, and felt for myself
the bitterness of tears.

Thus must it ever be--by actual suffering must the young be persuaded of
the struggle that is before them--well is it when there is one to say, "God
is here."

CHAPTER IX.

We must bring Uncle Bacchus's wife before our readers. She is a tall,
dignified, bright mulatto woman, named Phillis; it is with the qualities of
her heart and mind, rather than her appearance, that we have to do. Bayard
Taylor, writing from Nubia, in Upper Egypt, says:--"Those friends of the
African race, who point to Egypt as a proof of what that race has done, are
wholly mistaken. The only negro features represented in Egyptian sculpture
are those of the slaves and captives taken in the Ethiopian wars of the
Pharaohs. The temples and pyramids throughout Nubia, as far as Abyssinia,
all bear the hieroglyphics of these monarchs. There is no evidence in all
the valley of the Nile that the negro race ever attained a higher degree of
civilization than is at present exhibited in Congo and Ashantee. I mention
this, not from any feeling hostile to that race, but simply to controvert
an op