none of them having effected their escape, with the exception of the innocent children who remained in Tulan.” A few lines farther on the interpreter says: “The two masters of penance were Quetzalcoatle and Totec, who was called by another name, Chipe; who, having taken the children and the innocent people who remained in Tulan, proceeded with them, peopling the world, and collecting along with them other people whom they chanced to find. They further add that, journeying in this manner with these people, they arrived at a certain mountain, which not being able to pass, they feign that they bored a subterranean way through it and so passed. Others say that they remained shut up and that they were transformed into stones, and other such fables.” The first part of this myth is, of course, merely ætiological of the practice of making vows to Xipe to capture and immolate an enemy in his honour, as, we shall see in the paragraph dealing with his festivals, was done on that occasion. But I would point out that it possesses some importance as providing further evidence regarding the existence of the ascetic life in Mexico, most of the myths dealing with which, like that under discussion, are connected with the Toltecs, the people of Quetzalcoatl. Xipe, who plays the part of the Toltec Jeremiah, is here the subject of a tale which is also recounted of Tezcatlipocâ, with whom he is frequently confounded or identified, perhaps because both were great gods of the sacrificial stone, or for the reason that practically all Mexican cults tended to gravitate towards Tezcatlipocâ in late times. That portion of the story which details the burial en masse of the Toltecs is, of course, the widespread tale of the disappearance of the old hero-race underground—the fate which overtook Charlemagne and his peers, King Arthur and “the auld Picts” at Arthur’s Seat, near Edinburgh, Barbarossa and his men, and many another group of paladins. The whole may allude, in the ultimate, to mound-burial. It is strange too—or quite natural, as we believe in, or doubt, the penetration of America by alien influences—to find in Mexico an incomplete variant of the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I should not be surprised to find that Xipe piped the Toltec children into the Underworld, for Tezcatlipocâ, with whom he was identified, or at least the captive who represented that god at the Toxcatl festival, and who had a year of merriment in which to prepare himself for his fate, went through the city at intervals, playing upon a flute. This almost universal myth may allude to the ancient belief that the souls of the dead travelled with the wind, and were the cause of its sighing and whistling. [220] We know, too, that the whistling of the night wind through the mountains was regarded by the Mexicans as of evil omen, and that Yoalli Eecatl (The Wind of Night) was one of the names of Tezcatlipocâ. [221] The following song from the Sahagun MS. is in celebration of Xipe: