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a locked jaw showed itself. The poor woman was 

 the image of grief itself : she sat on her bed, 

 looking at the child which lay by her side with its 

 little hands clasped, its teeth clenched, and its eyes 

 fixed, writhing in the agony of the spasm, while 

 she was herself quite motionless and speechless, 

 although the tears trickled down her cheeks in- 

 cessantly. All assistance was fruitless : her thought- 

 lessness for five minutes had killed the infant, and, 

 at noon to-day it expired. 



This woman was a tender mother, had borne ten 

 children, and yet has now but one alive : another, 

 at present in the hospital, has borne seven, and 

 but one has lived to puberty; and the instances 

 of those who have had four, five, six children, 

 without succeeding in bringing up one, in spite 

 of the utmost attention and indulgence, are very 

 numerous ; so heedless and inattentive are the 

 best-in tentioned mothers, and so subject in this 

 climate are infants to dangerous complaints. The 

 locked jaw is the common and most fatal one; so 

 fatal, indeed, that the midwife (the graundee is her 

 negro appellation) told me, the other day, " Oh, 

 massa, till nine days over, we no hope of them." 

 Certainly care and kindness are not adequate to 

 save the children, for the son of a sovereign could 

 not have been more anxiously well treated than 

 was the poor little negro who died this morning. 



The negroes are always buried in their own gar- 

 dens, and many strange and fantastical ceremonies 



H 



