r 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.

As for the flesh, it was indeed only some of that "one flesh" of which
we all are made; but the blood--to go into finer distinctions--the
blood, as distinguished from the milk of her Alibamon foster-mother, was
the blood of the royal caste of the great Toltec mother-race, which,
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 brai