ying places were always avoided, and every means taken to prevent the
departed spirits exercising a malicious influence on those remaining
behind.

These craven fears do but reveal the natural repugnance of the animal to
a cessation of existence, and arise from the instinct of
self-preservation essential to organic life. Other rites, undertaken
avowedly for the behoof of the soul, prove and illustrate a simple but
unshaken faith in its continued existence after the decay of the body.

None of these is more common or more natural than that which attributes
to the emancipated spirit the same wants that it felt while on earth,
and with loving foresight provides for their satisfaction. Clothing and
utensils of war and the chase were, in ancient times, uniformly placed
by the body, under the impression that they would be of service to the
departed in his new home. Some few tribes in the far west still retain
the custom, but most were soon ridiculed into its neglect, or were
forced to omit it by the violation of tombs practised by depraved whites
in hope of gain. To these harmless offerings the northern tribes often
added a dog slain on the grave; and doubtless the skeletons of these
animals in so many tombs in Mexico and Peru point to similar customs
there. It had no deeper meaning than to give a companion to the spirit
in its long and lonesome journey to the far off land of shades. The
peculiar appropriateness of the dog arose not only from the guardianship
it exerts during life, but further from the symbolic signification it so
often had as representative of the goddess of night and the grave.

Where a despotic form of government reduced the subject almost to the
level of a slave and elevated the ruler almost to that of a superior
being, not animals only, but men, women, and children were frequently
immolated at the tomb of the cacique. The territory embraced in our own
country was not without examples of this horrid custom. On the lower
Mississippi, the Natchez Indians brought it with them from Central
America in all its ghastliness. When a sun or chief died, one or several
of his wives and his highest officers were knocked on the head and
buried with him, and at such times the barbarous privilege was allowed
to any of the lowest caste to at once gain admittance to the highest by
the deliberate murder of their own children on the funeral pyre--a
privilege which respectable writers tell us human beings were found base
en