The maiden laughed wildly; it was not the laugh of mirth or mischief, there was a madness in it that thrilled and awed.

“Do you know you are on the graves of 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 French of the conspiracy for their destruction.  In my day-dreaming I have talked with these; and learned with delight of their bliss in their eternal hunting-grounds.  And as I have knelt here, they in hosts have come to me with all their legends and long accounts against the white man, and I have wept above these dry bones, and felt too it was the fate of the white man, when his mission shall have been completed on earth, and his nation’s age bear him into the ground, and only his legends shall live a tradition, like that of the Natchez.