If the respiration of the dying man be not heard at a distance like a pair of bellows in Vulcan's workshop, and if his breath stop even for a moment, they proclaim with a Stentorian voice, that he has given up the ghost. A great crowd assembles on all sides, exclaiming, he is dead, he is no more. All the married women and widows of the town crowd to the mourning, attired as I have described before, and whilst they are filling the streets with confused wailings, with the rattling of gourds and beating of pans covered with stags' skins, a sudden shout is often heard announcing, that the man whom they mourn for as dead is come to life again. The joyous exclamation, he is revived, is instantly substituted for the mournful howling of the women, some of whom return home, whilst others hasten to the miserable mortal on the confines of life and death, and torment him with their dreadful yellings, till at last they deprive him of life. After his death, the first business of the bystanders is to pull out the heart and tongue of the deceased, boil them, and give them to a dog to devour, that the author of his death may soon die also. The corpse, while yet warm, is clothed according to the fashion of his country, wrapped in a hide, and bound with leathern thongs, the head being covered with a cloth, or any garment at hand. The savage Abipones will not endure the body of a dead man to remain long in the house; while yet warm, it is conveyed on ready horses to the grave. Women are appointed to go forward on swift steeds, to dig the grave, and honour the funeral with lamentations. What, if we say that many of the Abipones are buried because they are thought dead, but that in reality they die, because they are buried? It is not unlikely that these poor wretches are suffocated, either by the hide with which they are bound, or by the earth which is heaped over them. But as they pull out the heart and tongue of the deceased, it cannot be doubted that they are dead when they are buried; though I strongly suspect that the heart is sometimes cut out when they are half alive, and would perhaps revive were they not prematurely deprived of this necessary instrument of life. The savages, who hasten the burying of their dead so much, presumed to censure us for keeping the Christian Indians out of their graves many hours after their decease.