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.
"The hieroglyphics of Thotmes, of Rameses, of Menephthah, and of the host of kings gone before these in Egypt's old life, cannot be read; their language, letters, and traditions, too, sleep beyond the revelations of time, and yet their tombs, like these, give up their bones to the curious, who group through the catacombs, or dig at the base of their monumental pyramids. All besides has passed away and is lost. Not even the color of the great people who filled these monuments, and carved from the solid stone these miles of galleries, now filled to repletion with their mummied dead, and whose capacity is sufficient to entomb the dead of a nation for thousands of years, is known now to those who people the fields reclaimed from the forest beyond the memory of time.
"Nations are born, have their periods of youthful vigor, their manhood of sturdy strength, the tottering of decrepit age, the imbecility of superstitious dotage—and their death is final extinction. Such is man, and such is the world. What we are, we know; what we shall be, we know not, save that we only leave a pile of bones. Come, we are approaching home, and the moon dares to shine, ere yet the sun has gone. Yonder is brother, and I expect a scolding; but let him fret—it is not often I have a toy. Fate threw you in my way and you must not complain if I use you."
"I shall not complain," replied the astonished young man; "but will you ride again to-morrow?"
She checked up her steed (a noble one he was) and seemed to take in his entire man, as slowly her eye went up from his stirrup to his face, when she said: "To-morrow, ah, to-morrow! Who can tell what to-morrow may bring forth? To you and to me, there may come no to-morrow. We may in a twinkling be hurled from our sphere into oblivion. The earth may open to-night, or even now, and we may drop into her bosom of liquid fire, and be only ashes to-morrow.