"Three thousand years ago the Hirpani, or Wolves, an ancient Sabine tribe of Italy, were wont to collect on Mount Soracte, and there go through certain rites, in memory of an oracle which predicted their extinction when they ceased to gain their living as wolves do, by violence and plunder. Therefore they dressed in wolf-skins, [1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 247. 2. Ibid.] {p. 201} _ran with barks and howls over burning coals_, and gnawed wolfishly whatever they could seize."[1] All the tribes of the Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Natchez, who, according to tradition, were in remote times banded into one common confederacy, unanimously located their earliest ancestry near an artificial eminence in the valley of the Big Black River, in the Natchez country, whence they pretended to have emerged. This hill is an elevation of earth about half a mile square and fifteen or twenty feet high. From its northeast corner a wall of equal height extends for nearly half a mile to the high land. This was the _Nunne Chaha_, properly _Nanih waiya_, sloping hill, famous in Choctaw story, and which Captain Gregg found they had not yet forgotten in their Western home. "The legend was, that in its center was a cave, the house of the Master of Breath. Here he made the first men from the _clay around him, and, as at that time the waters covered the earth_, he raised the wall to dry them on. When the soft mud had hardened into elastic flesh and firm bone, he _banished the waters to their channels and beds_, and gave the dry land to his creatures."[2] Here, again, we have the beginnings of the present race of men in a cave, surrounded by clay and water, which covered the earth, and we have the water subsiding into its channels and beds, and the dry land appearing, whereupon the men emerged from the cave. A parallel to this Southern legend occurs among the Six Nations of the North. They with one consent looked to a mountain near the falls of the Oswego River, in the State of New York, as the locality where their forefathers saw the light of day; and their name, Oneida, signifies _the people of the stone_. [1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 217. 2. Ibid., p. 242.] {p. 202} The cave of Pacarin-Tampu, already alluded to, the Lodgings of the Dawn, or the Place of Birth of the Peruvians, was five leagues distant from Cuzco, surrounded by a sacred grove, and inclosed with temples of great antiquity. "From its hallowed recesses the mythical civilizers, of Peru, tile first of men, emerged, and in it, during the time of the flood, the remnants of the race escaped the fury of the waves."[1] We read in the legends of Oraibi, hereafter quoted more fully, that the people climbed up a ladder from a lower world to this--that is, they ascended from the cave in which they had taken refuge. This was in an age of cold and darkness; there was yet no sun or moon.