n in a
wife.

The great sun was indeed their Lycurgus. If before his advent among
them they had any laws, these had become obsolete, and his edicts
adopted universally. Their traditions represent him as living to
extreme old age, seeing his descendants of the fourth generation. These
were all little suns, and constituted the nobility of their nation,
which extended at one time to the country above, as far as St. Louis
and across to the Wabash. These traditions were carefully kept. Every
two years there were selected from the most intelligent boys of the
nation ten, to whom these traditions were carefully taught by the
depositories of them who had kept them best for the greatest time. They
were careful to exact that no word or fact should be withheld, and this
lesson was daily taught until the boy was a man, and every legend a
familiar memory. These he was compelled to repeat daily lest the memory
should rust, and for this purpose they went forth to all the villages
repeating all of these legends to all the people.

There were others selected in like manner to whom the laws were taught
as the traditions, and in like manner these were taught the people. In
every community there was a little sun to administer these laws, and
every complaint was submitted to him, and great ceremony was observed
at every trial, especially criminal trials. The judge, or little sun,
purified himself in the forest, imploring the enlightenment of the Good
Spirit, and purging away the influence of bad spirits by his
purification; and when he felt himself a fitted tabernacle of pure
justice, he came forward and rendered his judgment in the presence of
all the villagers of his jurisdiction, whose attention was compulsory.

It was one of the laws established in the beginning of the reign of the
Great Sun, that his posterity should not marry _inter se_, but only
with the common people of the nation. This custom was expelling the
pure blood of royalty more and more every generation, and long after
the arrival of the Natchez upon the Mississippi, the great and little
suns were apparently of the pure blood of the red man. Their
traditions, however, preserved the history of every cross, and when
Lasalle found these at Natchez and the White Apple village, nearly
every one could boast of relationship to the Great Sun. At that time
they had diminished to an insignificant power, and were overawed by
their more numerous and more powerful neighbors, the Cho