The Seminoles and Muskhogulges are fairly tall, and, by an unusual contrast, their mothers, wives, and daughters are the smallest race of women known in America. The Indian women who landed near us, born of mixed Cherokee and Castilian blood, were tall in stature. Two of them were like the creoles of San Domingo and Mauritius, but yellow and delicate as the women of the Ganges. These two Floridan women, cousins on the father's side, served as my models, one for Atala, the other for Céluta: they excelled the portraits I drew of them only by that variable and fugitive truth of nature, that physiognomy of race and climate which I was not able to express. There was something indefinable in that oval visage, in that shaded complexion, which one seemed to see through a light, orange-tinted smoke, in that hair so black and soft, those eyes so long, half-hidden beneath the veil of two satiny eyelids that opened indolently; in short, in the two-fold seduction of the Indian and the Spanish woman. The meeting with our hosts occasioned a certain alteration in our movements: our trading agents began to inquire about horses; it was decided that we should go to fix ourselves in the neighbourhood of the studs. The plain in which our camp stood was covered with bulls, cows, horses, bisons, buffaloes, cranes, turkeys, pelicans: these birds mottled the green background of our savannah with white, black, and pink stains. Our traders and hunters were stirred by many passions: not passions of race, education, or prejudice, but natural passions, full and absolute, making straight for their object, having for witnesses a tree fallen in the depths of an unknown forest, a nameless stream. The relations between the Spaniards and the Creek women formed the ground-work of the adventures; the "Burnt-woods" played the principal part in those romances. One story was famous: that of a trader in strong waters seduced and ruined by a "painted woman" or courtesan. This story, put into Seminole verse with the title of _Tabamica_, was sung in passing through the woods[512]. Carried off in their turn by the colonists, the Indian women soon died forsaken at Pensacola[513]: their misfortunes went to swell the _Romanceros_ and to be numbered among the ballads of Ximenes. * The earth is a charming mother; we issue from her womb: in childhood, she holds us to her breasts swollen with milk and honey; in youth and old age, she lavishes upon us her refreshing waters, her harvests and her fruits; she offers us, wherever we may go, a shade, a bath, a table and a bed; she opens her entrails again to receive us after death, and throws a coverlet of herbs and flowers over our remains, while she secretly transforms us into her own substance, to reproduce us under some graceful shape. That is what I said to myself on waking, when my first look fell upon the sky, the canopy of my bed.