Mr. ——­ alone remained standing in the presence of the dead man, and of the living God to whom his slaves were now appealing.  I cannot tell you how profoundly the whole ceremony, if such it could be called, affected me, and there was nothing in the simple and pathetic supplication of the poor black artisan to check or interfere with the solemn influences of the whole scene.  It was a sort of conventional methodist prayer, and probably quite as conventional as all the rest was the closing invocation of God’s blessing upon their master, their mistress, and our children; but this fairly overcame my composure, and I began to cry very bitterly; for these same individuals, whose implication in the state of things in the midst of which we are living, seemed to me as legitimate a cause for tears as for prayers.  When the prayer was concluded we all rose, and the coffin being taken up, proceeded to the people’s burial-ground, when London read aloud portions of the funeral service from the prayer-book—­I presume the American episcopal version of our Church service, for what he read appeared to be merely a selection from what was perfectly familiar to me; but whether he himself extracted what he uttered I did not enquire.  Indeed I was too much absorbed in the whole scene, and the many mingled emotions it excited of awe and pity, and an indescribable sensation of wonder at finding myself on this slave soil, surrounded by MY slaves, among whom again I knelt while the words proclaiming to the living and the dead the everlasting covenant of freedom, ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ sounded over the prostrate throng, and mingled with the heavy flowing of the vast river sweeping, not far from where we stood, through the darkness by which we were now encompassed (beyond the immediate circle of our torch-bearers).  There was something painful to me in ——­’s standing while we all knelt on the earth, for though in any church in Philadelphia he would have stood during the praying of any minister, here I wished he would have knelt, to have given his slaves some token of his belief that—­at least in the sight of that Master to whom we were addressing our worship—­all men are equal.  The service ended with a short address from London upon the subject of Lazarus, and the confirmation which the story of his resurrection afforded our hopes.  The words were simple and rustic, and of course uttered in the peculiar sort of jargon which is the habitual negro speech; but there was nothing in the slightest degree incongruous or grotesque in the matter or manner, and the exhortations not to steal, or lie, or neglect to work well for massa, with which the glorious hope of immortality was blended in the poor slave preacher’s closing address, was a moral adaptation, as wholesome as it was touching, of the great Christian theory to the capacities and consciences of his hearers.  When the coffin was lowered the grave was found to be partially filled with water—­naturally enough, for