It is incredible how religiously the Abipones perform the sepulchral honours of their friends. If they see one of their comrades fall in battle they snatch the lifeless body from the midst of the enemies to bury it properly in its native soil. To lessen the burden, they strip off the flesh and bury it in the ground; the bones they put into a hide, and carry home on a horse, a journey not unfrequently of two hundred leagues. But if the enemy presses on them, and they are forced to leave the body on the field of battle, the relations seek for the bones on the first opportunity, and take no rest till they find them, however much risk and labour must be encountered in accomplishing this. Moreover, the Abipones are not content with any sepulchre, but take especial care that fathers may lie with their sons, wives with their husbands, grandchildren with their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and that every family should have its own burying-place. This nation, having formerly inhabited more towards the north, know that their ancestors' monuments exist there, and venerate them as something divine. They feel the most lively pleasure in mingling the bones of their countrymen, wherever, amidst their perpetual peregrinations, they may have been buried, with the bones of their ancestors. Hence it is that they dig them up and remove them so often, and carry them over immense tracts of land, till at length they repose in the ancient and woody mausoleum of their forefathers; which they distinguish by certain marks cut in the trees, and by other signs taught them by their ancestors. The Brazilians and Guaranies formerly disliked the trouble of digging pits for sepulchres. These hungry anthropophagi buried within their own bowels the flesh of those that yielded to fate. It must be confessed however that the Guaranies of after-times, more humane than their ancestors, placed dead bodies in clay pitchers. Seeking the savages in Mbaeverà in the midst of the woods, I met with a plain artificially made, the trees being cut down for the purpose, and there I found three pitchers of this kind, each of which would contain a man, but all empty. The bottoms of the pitchers were placed toward the sky, the mouth towards the ground. But from sepulchres, let us hasten to funeral obsequies. CHAPTER XXVI. OF THE MOURNING, THE EXEQUIES, AND FUNERAL CEREMONIES OF THE ABIPONES.