the corpse lying east and west, and not as the traveller Meyen
has suggested,[244-4] from the reminiscences of some ancient migration.
Beyond the Cordilleras, quite to the coast of Brazil, the innumerable
hordes who wandered through the sombre tropical forests of that immense
territory, also pointed to the west, to the region beyond the mountains,
as the land where the souls of their ancestors lived in undisturbed
serenity; or, in the more brilliant imaginations of the later
generations, in a state of perennial inebriety, surrounded by infinite
casks of rum, and with no white man to dole it out to them.[245-1] The
natives of the extreme south, of the Pampas and Patagonia, suppose the
stars are the souls of the departed. At night they wander about the sky,
but the moment the sun rises they hasten to the cheerful light, and are
seen no more until it disappears in the west. So the Eskimo of the
distant north, in the long winter nights when the aurora bridges the sky
with its changing hues and arrowy shafts of light, believes he sees the
spirits of his ancestors clothed in celestial raiment, disporting
themselves in the absence of the sun, and calls the phenomenon _the
dance of the dead_.

The home of the sun was the heaven of the red man; but to this joyous
abode not every one without distinction, no miscellaneous crowd, could
gain admittance. The conditions were as various as the national
temperaments. As the fierce gods of the Northmen would admit no soul to
the banquets of Walhalla but such as had met the "spear-death" in the
bloody play of war, and shut out pitilessly all those who feebly
breathed their last in the "straw death" on the couch of sickness, so
the warlike Aztec race in Nicaragua held that the shades of those who
died in their beds went downward and to naught; but of those who fell
in battle for their country to the east, "to the place whence comes the
sun."[246-1] In ancient Mexico not only the warriors who were thus
sacrificed on the altar of their country, but with a delicate and
poetical sense of justice that speaks well for the refinement of the
race, also those women who perished in child-birth, were admitted to the
home of the sun. For are not they also heroines in the battle of life?
Are they not also its victims? And do they not lay down their lives for
country and kindred? Every morning, it was imagined, the heroes came
forth in battle array, and with shout and song and the ring of weapons,
acco