In the year 1673, and in the royal hovel of a Tchoupitoulas village not far removed from that “Buffalo’s Grazing-ground,” now better known as New Orleans, was born Lufki-Humma, otherwise Red Clay.  The mother of Red Clay was a princess by birth as well as by marriage.  For the father, with that devotion to his people’s interests presumably common to rulers, had ten moons before ventured northward into the territory of the proud and exclusive Natchez nation, and had so prevailed with—­so outsmoked—­their “Great Sun,” as to find himself, as he finally knocked the ashes from his successful calumet, possessor of a wife whose pedigree included a long line of royal mothers—­fathers being of little account in Natchez heraldry—­extending back beyond the Mexican origin of her nation, and disappearing only in the effulgence of her great original, the orb of day himself.  As to Red Clay’s paternal ancestry, we must content ourselves with the fact that the father was not only the diplomate we have already found him, but a chief of considerable eminence; that is to say, of seven feet stature.

It scarce need be said that when Lufki-Humma was born, the mother arose at once from her couch of skins, herself bore the infant to the neighboring bayou and bathed it—­not for singularity, nor for independence, nor for vainglory, but only as one of the heart-curdling conventionalities which made up the experience of that most pitiful of holy things, an Indian mother.

Outside the lodge door sat and continued to sit, as she passed out, her master or husband.  His interest in the trivialities of the moment may be summed up in this, that he was as fully prepared as some men are in more civilized times and places to hold his queen to strict account for the sex of her offspring.  Girls for the Natchez, if they preferred them, but the chief of the Tchoupitoulas wanted a son.  She returned from the water, came near, sank upon her knees, laid the infant at his feet, and lo! a daughter.

Then she fell forward heavily upon her face.  It may have been muscular exhaustion, it may have been the mere wind of her hasty-tempered matrimonial master’s stone hatchet as it whiffed by her skull; an inquest now would be too great an irony; but something blew out her “vile candle.”

Among the squaws who came to offer the accustomed funeral howlings, and seize mementoes from the deceased lady’s scant leavings, was one who had in her own palmetto hut an empty cradle scarcely cold, and therefore a necessity at her breast, if not a place in her heart, for the unfortunate Lufki-Humma; and thus it was that this little waif came to be tossed, a droll hypothesis of flesh, blood, nerve and brain, into the hands of wild nature with carte blanche as to the disposal of it.  And now, since this was Agricola’s most boasted ancestor—­since it appears the darkness of her cheek had no effect to make him less white, or qualify his right to smite the fairest and most distant descendant of an African on the face, and since this proud station and right could not have sprung from the squalid surroundings of her birth, let us for a moment contemplate these crude materials.