The Abipones think it a great happiness to be buried in a wood under the shade of trees, and grieve for the fate of those that are interred in a chapel, calling them captives of the Father. In the dread of such sepulture, they at first shunned baptism. They dig a very shallow pit to place the body in, that it may not be pressed by too great a weight of earth heaped over it. They fill the surface of the grave with thorny boughs, to keep off tigers, which delight in carcasses. On the top of the sepulchre, they place an inverted pan, that if the dead man should stand in need of water, he may not want a vessel to hold it in. They hang a garment from a tree near the place of interment, for him to put on if he chooses to come out of the grave. They also fix a spear near the graves of men, that an instrument of war and the chase may be in readiness for them. For the same purpose, beside the graves of their Caciques, and men distinguished for military fame, they place horses, slain with many ceremonies; a custom common to most of the equestrian savages in Paraguay. The best horses, those which the deceased used and delighted in most, are generally slain at the grave. Laugh as much as you please at the sepulchral rites of the Abipones; you cannot deny them to be a proof of their believing in the immortality of the soul. They know that something of them will survive after death, which will last to all eternity, and never die; but what becomes of that immortal thing, which we call the soul, and they the image, shade, or echo, when it is separated from the body, and whether it will enjoy pleasures or receive punishments, they never think of enquiring. The southern savages believe that it dwells under the earth in tents, and employs itself in hunting, and that the spirits of dead emus descend along with it to the same subterranean abode. The Abipones, who do not credit such idle tales, believe that some part of them survives the death of the body, and that it exists somewhere, but they openly confess themselves ignorant of the place and other circumstances. They fear the manes or shades of the defunct, and believe that they become visible to the living when invoked by a magic incantation, to be interrogated concerning future things. As I was passing the night on the banks of the Parana, the Abipones, my companions, hearing their voices re-echoed against the trees, and windings of the shores, attributed the circumstance to ghosts and disembodied spirits wandering in these solitudes, till I explained to them the nature of an echo. They call little ducks, which fly about in flocks at night uttering a mournful hiss, the shades of the dead. These, and other circumstances, which I have related elsewhere, prove that the Abipones believe in the immortality of the soul.