a great nation?" she asked. "This
mound and yonder three, were, the burial-places of the Natchez Indians.
The Suns and Sachems sleep here, and he, the Great Sun, who came from
the orbit's self, and was their lawgiver, and in whom and whose
divinity they believed as the Jews in that of Moses, or the Christians
in the Redeemer. Is it not all a mystery--strange, strange,
incomprehensible, and unnatural? What is your faith?"

"To worship where I love; the divinity of my soul's worship is the
devotion of my wild heart.'

"Why, you are mysterious! Have you, as had the Natchez, a holy fire
which is never extinguished in your heart? Is the flame first kindled
burning still? Did your sun come to you with fire in her hand and
kindle it in your heart? Your words mean so much. Was she, or is she a
red maiden of the wild prairies; or dwells she in a mansion surrounded
with the appliances of wealth, reclining on cushions of velvet and
sleeping on a bed of down, canopied with a pavilion of damask satin
fretted with stars of silver; with handmaids to subserve and minister
to every want?" And again the wild laugh rang to the echo among the
hills and dense forests all around. "O! I see I have tuned the wrong
chord and have made discord, not music in your mind. Shall we return?
You are not yet strong, and your weakness I have made weaker, because I
have disturbed the fountain of your heart and brought up painful
memories?"

"You are strange," said her companion, "and guess wide of the mark. The
untutored savage is only a romance at a distance--the reality of their
presence a disgusting fact. They are wild, untamable, and wicked,
without sentiment or sympathy, cruel and murderous; disgusting in their
habits and brutal in their passions."

"And yet, sir, the stories which come down to us of these so quietly
sleeping here are full of romance and poetry. Their intercourse with
the French impressed that mercurial people with exalted notions of
their humanity, chivalry, and nobleness of nature. Can it be that these
historians only wrote romances? You must not disturb this romance. If
it is an illusion let me enjoy it; do not strip from it the beard, the
hair, the hunting-shirt, the bow and quiver--reality or fiction, it is
sweet to the memory. How often have I wandered from our home and stood
here alone and conjured from the spirit-land the ghosts of the Great
Suns, the Stung Serpent, and the chief of the Beard, and hers who
warned the Fr