The speaker was Crazy Joe, the time, midsummer of 1860, the place the banks of a creek at the foot of the mountains, not more than two or three hundred feet from Uncle Dan's cabin.
"Then the book says God made man out of clay. Josephus says he called the first man Adam, because Adam means red, and He made him out of red clay. Now, if man could once be made out of clay, why not now? Maybe God will let me make a man, too."
Filling his hands with mud, he set vigorously to work. No sculptor could have been more in earnest than was Crazy Joe. He rolled and patted the mud into shape, first the feet, then the legs, then the body. Occasionally the body would tumble down, but he patiently set to work again, persevering until he had body, arm and head all completed. His mud man was a little over five feet in height, and greatly admired by his maker and owner.
"Now I have accomplished almost as much as God did," soliloquized Joe. "I have made a man of clay; it only remains for him to speak and move, and he will be equal to any of us."
He went to the cabin and acquainted Uncle Dan with the wonderful work he had performed, and asked him to come and see it. The next day he went to view the object of poor Joe's two days' labor, greatly to Joe's delight. Uncle Dan then returned to his cabin for his gun, and Joe went to Snagtown, which was between Mr. Tompkins' plantation and the hunter's cabin.
Joe there informed the storekeeper, the village postmaster, and a few others, of his remarkable piece of handiwork, and asked them to come and see it. They promised to go the next day, if Joe would stay all night in the village.
Joe stayed, and that night there came a heavy rain. The creek overflowed and Joe's mud man was washed away. He conducted a party of hunters to the spot next morning, but the man of clay had vanished.
"He must have walked away," said Joe shaking his head in a puzzled manner. "He has gone off, though I cautioned him to wait until I came back."
The hunting party explained to Joe that his mud man had become tired of waiting, and left, and went off themselves, leaving the mortified Joe searching about the soft soil for tracks of the missing mud man. His search for the trail took him to Snagtown.
Patrick Henry Diggs, whom we met in his boyhood as the youthful orator at Mr. Tompkins' was, in 1860, a lawyer. His parents were dead, leaving him a limited education, a superficial knowledge of law, and a very small property. The paternal homestead was mortgaged, but Mr. Diggs still kept old Mose, for the sake of being a slaveholder and maintaining aristocratic appearance. Mr. Diggs had but little practice, and found it a difficult thing to make his own living. He was about twenty-eight years old, short and plump like his father. The most peculiar portion of his anatomy was his head. The forehead was low, and the small round head more nearly resembled a cocoanut painted white, with hair on its top, than anything else to which we can compare it. The hair was very thick and cut very short. The eyebrows were heavy and close together, the eyes dark gray and restless, the nose small and straight. The most admirable portion of his physiognomy, Mr. Diggs thought, were his side-whiskers, which were short and dark, growing half-way down his small, red cheeks and coalescing with his short mustache. Mr. Diggs was exceedingly aristocratic, and wore gold-rimmed spectacles on his short nose. These glasses, which gave him a ridiculous appearance, were removed when he wanted to read or exercise his unobstructed vision. His friends tried to persuade him to give them up, but in vain. And with his glasses on his nose, his head thrown back in order to see persons of ordinary height, and his fat little hands in his pockets, he strutted about the streets of Snagtown.