Let us follow this road, beyond the pines—a little higher—here. The spot we have thought and dreamed about but never before seen.
If any one should ask why we came, hardly pausing, by so many mounds of soldiers who died in the same cause, as may be read on their tablets, we would answer that, with the soul of this one, all glory for us passed out of our marvellous sunsets, warmth from the color of our autumns, charm from our ice-bound winters, sweetness from the breath of our springs.
Down there, bordering this field consecrated to Catholic dead, is the "colored folks' ground."
How tidy it looks. Formerly it was a huddle of neglected hillocks; many of them sunken as if they who, deprecating scorn, had crept through the world in the shadow of the wall, shrank even here from obtruding.
How many of us Catholics, of the thousands that crowd that church of which we see the cross above the hill-top, or lie here with hands crossed to God, ever offered a prayer for those neglected souls, living or dead?
Before that church was built there came from the West Indies, following the fortunes of an exiled family, a gray-haired negro. He did not persevere in hearing Mass because the children insulted him on the street—waited for him with stones in their hands at the corners of the church. He died, and, to fulfil his last wish, some of his people planted a cross upon his unsodded grave.
I used to know every mound, from that Egyptian-faced vault,
"Against whose portal I had thrown,
In childhood, many an echoing stone;
And shrank to think, poor heart of sin,
It was the dead that groaned within;"
to the cheerful nook where the nurseryman's children sleep under their coverlet of flowers. From the hero's pillar by the highway, with the record,
"He lived as mothers wish their sons to live,
He died as fathers wish their sons to die,"