"How many bodies do you carry each week?" I asked of the captain of the city boat.
"About fifty," he said. But later on both he and the official on the Island told me that there were six thousand buried here yearly, so it will be seen that his estimate per week was less than half what it should have been.
I looked at the stack of pine boxes, the ends of which showed from beneath a tarpaulin on the deck.
They were stacked five deep. There were seven wee ones, hardly larger than would be filled by a good-sized kitten.
I said: "They are so very small. I don't see how a baby was put inside."
The man to whom I spoke—a deck hand who was a "ten-day-self-committed," so the captain told me later—smiled a grim, sly smile and said:
"I reckon you're allowin' fer trimmin's. This kind don't get piliers and satin linin's. It don't take much room for a baby with no trimmin's an' mighty little clothes."
"Why are two of them dark wood and all the rest light?" I asked of the same man.
"I reckon the folks of them two had a few cents to pay fergittin' their baby's box stained. It kind of looks nicer to them, and when they get a little more money, they'll come and get it dug up and put it in a grave by itself or some other place. It seems kind of awful to some folks to have their little baby put in amongst such a lot."
He said it all quite simply, quite apologetically, as if I might think it rather unreasonable—this feeling that it was "kind of awful to think of the baby in amongst such a lot."