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CHAPTER XXX The Burial THE DEATH OFDRED fell like a night of despair on the hearts of the little fugitive circle in the swamps—on the hearts of multitudes in the surrounding plantations, who had regarded him as a prophet and a deliverer. He in whom they trusted was dead! The splendid, athletic form, so full of wild vitality, the powerful arm, the trained and keen-seeing eye, all struck down at once! The grand and solemn voice hushed, and all the splendid poetry of olden time, the inspiring symbols and prophetic dreams, which had so wrought upon his own soul, and with which he had wrought upon the souls of others, seemed to pass away with him, and to recede into the distance and become unsubstantial, like the remembered sounds of mighty winds, or solemn visions of evening clouds, in times long departed. On that night, when the woods had ceased to reverberate the brutal sounds of baying dogs, and the more brutal profanity of drunken men; when the leaves stood still on the trees, and the forest lay piled up in the darkness like black clouds, and the morning star was standing like a calm angelic presence above them, there might have been heard in the little clearing a muffled sound of footsteps, treading heavily, and voices of those that wept with a repressed and quiet weeping, as they bore the wild chieftain to his grave beneath the blasted tree. Of the undaunted circle who had met there at the same hour many evenings before, some had dared to be present tonight ; for, hearing the report of the hunt, they had left their huts on the plantations by stealth, when all were asleep, and, eluding the vigilance of the patrols, the night watch which commonly guards plantations, had come to the forest to learn the fate of their friends; and bitter was the dismay and anguish which filled their souls when they learned the result. It is melancholy to reflect, that among the children of one Father an event which excites in one class bitterness 514 THE BURIAL 515 and lamentation should in another be cause of exultation and triumph . But the world has been thousands of years and not yet learned the first two words of the Lord's prayer; and not until all tribes and nations have learned these will his kingdom come, and his will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven. Among those who stood around the grave, none seemed more bowed down and despairing than one whom we have before introduced to the reader, under the name of Hannibal. He was a tall and splendidly formed negro, whose large head, high forehead, and marked features, indicated resolution and intellectual ability. He had been all his life held as the property of an uneducated man, of very mean and parsimonious character, who was singularly divided in his treatment of him, by a desire to make the most of his energies and capabilities as a slave, and a fear lest they should develop so fast as to render him unfit for the condition of slavery. Hannibal had taught himself to read and write, but the secret of the acquisition was guarded in his own bosom, as vigilantly as the traveller among thieves would conceal in his breast an inestimable diamond; for he well knew that, were these acquisitions discovered, his master's fears would be so excited as to lead him to realize at once a present sum upon him, by selling him to the more hopeless prison-house of the far South, thus separating him from his wife and family. Hannibal was generally employed as the keeper of a ferry-boat by his master, and during the hours when he was waiting for passengers found many opportunities for gratifying, in an imperfect manner, his thirst for knowledge. Those who have always had books about them more than they could or would read know nothing of the passionate eagerness with which a repressed and starved intellect devours in secret its stolen food. In a little chink between the logs of his ferry-house there was secreted a Bible, a copy of Robinson Crusoe, and an odd number of a Northern newspaper which had been dropped from the pocket of a passenger; and when the door was shut and barred at night, and his bit of pine knot lighted, he would take these out and read them hour by hour. There he yearned after...

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