All this was the attire he wore from the beginning of his year of preparation; but twenty days before the coming of the festival they changed his vestments, washed away the paint or dye from his skin, and cut down his long hair to the length, and arranged it after the fashion, of the hair of the captains, tying it up on the crown of the head with feathers and fringe and two gold-buttoned tassels. At the same time they married to him four damsels, who had been pampered and educated for this purpose, and who were surnamed respectively after the four goddesses, Xochiquetzal, Xilonen, Atlantonan, and Uixtociuatl. Five days before the great day of the feast, the day of the feast being counted one, all the people, high and low, the king it would appear being alone excepted, went out to celebrate with the man-god a solemn banquet and dance, in the ward called Tecanman; the fourth day before the feast the same was done in the ward in which was guarded the statue of Tezcatlipocâ. The little hill or island called Tepetzinco, rising out of the waters of the Lake of Mexico, was the scene of the next day’s solemnities; which were renewed for the last time on the next day, or that immediately preceding the great day, on another like island called Tepelpulco, or Tepepulco. There, with the four women who had been given to him for his consolation, the honoured victim was put into a covered canoe usually reserved for the sole use of the king, and he was carried across the lake to a place called Tlapitzaoayan, near the road that goes from Yztapalapan to Chalco, at a place where was a little hill called Acaccuilpan, or Cabaltepec. Here left him the four beautiful girls whose society for twenty days he had enjoyed, they returning to the capital with all the people. There accompanied him only those eight attendants who had been with him all the year. Almost alone, done with the joys of beauty, banquet, and dance, bearing a bundle of his flutes, he walked to a little cu, some distance from the road mentioned above, and about a league removed from the city. He marched up the temple steps; and as he ascended he dashed down and broke on every step one of the flutes that he had been accustomed to play on in the days of his prosperity. He reached the top, where he was sacrificed. From the sacrificial stone his body was not hurled down the steps, but was carried by four men down to the tzompantli, to the place of the spitting of heads.