“It is the Protestant cemetery,” replied John, “remarkable only for its ugliness and the number of inscriptions telling the same sad story of strangers in a strange land—persons brought here in quest of health from all parts of the country, only to die far away from home.”
“Where is the old Huguenot burying-ground?” asked Aunt Di.
“The Huguenots, poor fellows, never had a burying-ground, nor so much even as a burying, as far as I can learn,” said Sara.
“But there is one somewhere,” pursued Aunt Di. “I have heard it described as a spot of much interest.”
“That has been a standing item for years in all the Florida guide-books,” said John, “systematically repeated in the latest editions. They will give up a good deal, but that cherished Huguenot cemetery they must and will retain. The Huguenots, poor fellows, as Miss St. John says, never had a cemetery here, and it is only within comparatively modern times that there has been any Protestant cemetery whatever. Formerly the bodies of all persons not Romanists were sent across to the island for sepulture.”
The Shell Road having come to an end, we walked on in the moonlight, now on little grass patches, now in the deep sand, passing a ruined stone wall, all that was left of a pleasant home, destroyed, like many other outlying residences, during the war. The myrtle thickets along the road-side were covered with the clambering curling sprays of the yellow jasmine, the lovely wild flower that brings the spring to Florida. We stopped to gather the wreaths of golden blossoms, and decked ourselves with them, Southern fashion. Every one wears the jasmine. When it first appears every one says, “Have you seen it? It has come!” And out they go to gather it, and bring it home in triumph.
Passing through the odd little wicket, which, with the old-fashioned turnstile, is used in Florida instead of a latched gate, we found ourselves in a green lane bordered at the far end with cedars. Here, down on the North River, was the Rose Garden, now standing with its silent house fast asleep in the moonlight.
“I do not see Iris,” said Aunt Diana, anxiously.
“There is somebody over on the other side of the hedge,” said Sara.
We looked, and beheld two figures bending down and apparently scratching in the earth with sticks.