before it yielded its Mexican splendors to the conquering Aztec, throned
the jeweled and gold-laden Inca in the South, and sent the sacred fire
of its temples into the North by the hand of the Natchez. For it is a
short way of expressing the truth concerning Red Clay's tissues to say
she had the blood of her mother and the nerve of her father, the nerve
of the true North American Indian, and had it in its finest strength.

As to her infantine bones, they were such as needed not to fail of
straightness in the limbs, compactness in the body, smallness in hands
and feet, and exceeding symmetry and comeliness throughout. Possibly
between the two sides of the occipital profile there may have been an
Incaean tendency to inequality; but if by any good fortune her
impressible little cranium should escape the cradle-straps, the
shapeliness that nature loves would soon appear. And this very fortune
befell her. Her father's detestation of an infant that had not consulted
his wishes as to sex prompted a verbal decree which, among other
prohibitions, forbade her skull the distortions that ambitious and
fashionable Indian mothers delighted to produce upon their offspring.

And as to her brain: what can we say? The casket in which Nature sealed
that brain, and in which Nature's great step-sister, Death, finally laid
it away, has never fallen into the delighted fingers--and the remarkable
fineness of its texture will never kindle admiration in the triumphant
eyes--of those whose scientific hunger drives them to dig for _crania
Americana_; nor yet will all their learned excavatings ever draw forth
one of those pale souvenirs of mortality with walls of shapelier contour
or more delicate fineness, or an interior of more admirable
spaciousness, than the fair council-chamber under whose dome the mind
of Lufki-Humma used, about two centuries ago, to sit in frequent
conclave with high thoughts.