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.46 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.47
The following song from the Sahagun MS. is in celebration of Xipe:
Wherefore dost thou disguise thyself, O Night-drinker?
Put on thy golden garment.
O my god, thy rich sacrificial water descended;
The lofty cypress tree has become a quetzal;
That which was