A Negro Graveyard.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 236, 7 January 1888, Page 3

A Negro Graveyard.

The cemetery was recognisable from a distance by the numerous poles fixed in the ground. Rinkimongani's body had been placed in a box or coffin, for the Commi people are now so far advanced in civilisation they have adopted the white man's customs in this respect ; it is only, however, the head men who are laid in boxes, and they are not interred in the earth, but laid, according to the old native habit, on the surface* or inserted a small depth into the ground. The wood of my poor old friend's coffin was decayed,, and I could see his mouldering bones inside, together with the remains of his valuables that were buried with him, consisting of jugs and pots, a quantity of brass buttons, the remains of a coat, and an old umbrella stick, which, was all that was left of this article, a present from me, and which he always carried about with him. All around were skeletons and bones crumbling to powder, and broken relics which had been re* v'erently buried with the dead. , It was a place that one migftt mpralr - ise in—the humble, fragile graveyard of'a tribe of poor , negroes,which represented, in their eyes quite as pmch as our^roudmohu,ments l of l i stone, that will also in their turn^disappear. • l . ;

[ * Buffalo 'BilUayk' that a brush vwitH? \ Indians usually etfds ift' r',rapid re- M moval of hair.