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 opinion very prevalent in some parts of the United States.”

It seemed impossible to know Phillis without feeling for her sentiments of the highest respect.  The blood of the freeman and the slave mingled in her veins; her well-regulated mind slowly advanced to a conclusion; but once made, she rarely changed it.

Phillis would have been truly happy to have obtained her own freedom, and that of her husband and children:  she scorned the idea of running away, or of obtaining it otherwise than as a gift from her owner.  She was a firm believer in the Bible, and often pondered on the words of the angel, “Return and submit thyself to thy mistress.”  She had on one occasion accompanied her master and Mrs. Weston to the North, where she was soon found out by some of that disinterested class of individuals called Abolitionists.  In reply to the question, “Are you free?” there was but a moment’s hesitation; her pride of heart gave way to her inherent love of truth, “I’ll tell no lie,” she answered; “I am a slave!”

“Why do you not take your freedom?” was the rejoinder.  “You are in a free state; they cannot force you to the South, if you will take the offers we make you, and leave your master.”