ough to take advantage of.[239-1]

Oviedo relates that in the province of Guataro, in Guatemala, an actual
rivalry prevailed among the people to be slain at the death of their
cacique, for they had been taught that only such as went with him would
ever find their way to the paradise of the departed.[240-1] Theirs was
therefore somewhat of a selfish motive, and only in certain parts of
Peru, where polygamy prevailed, and the rule was that only one wife was
to be sacrificed, does the deportment of husbands seem to have been so
creditable that their widows actually disputed one with another for the
pleasure of being buried alive with the dead body, and bearing their
spouse company to the other world.[240-2] Wives who have found few
parallels since the famous matron of Ephesus!

The fire built nightly on the grave was to light the spirit on his
journey. By a coincidence to be explained by the universal sacredness of
the number, both Algonkins and Mexicans maintained it for _four_ nights
consecutively. The former related the tradition that one of their
ancestors returned from the spirit land and informed their nation that
the journey thither consumed just _four_ days, and that collecting fuel
every night added much to the toil and fatigue the soul encountered, all
of which could be spared it by the relatives kindling nightly a fire on
the grave. Or as Longfellow has told it:--

"Four days is the spirit's journey
To the land of ghosts and shadows,
Four its lonely night encampments.
Therefore when the dead are buried,
Let a fire as night approaches
Four times on the grave be kindled,
That the soul upon its journey
May not grope about in darkness."

The same length of time, say the Navajos, does the departed soul wander
over a gloomy marsh ere it can discover the ladder leading to the world
below, where are the homes of the setting and the rising sun, a land of
luxuriant plenty, stocked with game and covered with corn. To that land,
say they, sink all lost seeds and germs which fall on the earth and do
not sprout. There below they take root, bud, and ripen their
fruit.[241-1]

After four days, once more, in the superstitions of the Greenland
Eskimos, does the soul, for that term after death confined in the body,
at last break from its prison-house and either rise in the sky to dance
in the aurora borealis or descend into the pleasant land beneath the
earth, according to the manner of death