In this pitiable state were once the ancestors of all mankind.

If you doubt it, reader, peruse again the foregoing legends, and then turn to the following Central American prayer, the prayer of the Aztecs, already referred to on page 186, ante, addressed to the god Tezcatlipoca, himself represented as a flying or winged serpent, perchance the comet: 

“Is it possible that this lash and chastisement are not given for our correction and amendment, but only for our total destruction and overthrow; that the sun will never more shine upon us, but that we must remain in perpetual darkness? . . .  It is a sore thing to tell how we are all in

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darkness. . . .  O Lord, . . . make an end of this smoke and fog.  Quench also the burning and destroying fire of thine anger; let serenity come and clearness,” (light); “let the small birds of thy people begin to sing and approach the sun.”

There is still another Aztec prayer, addressed to the same deity, equally able, sublime, and pathetic, which it seems to me may have been uttered when the people had left their biding-place, when the conflagration had passed, but while darkness still covered the earth, before vegetation had returned, and while crops of grain as yet were not.  There are a few words in it that do not answer to this interpretation, where it refers to those “people who have something”; but there may have been comparative differences of condition even in the universal poverty; or these words may have been an interpolation of later days.  The prayer is as follows: 

“O our Lord, protector most strong and compassionate, invisible and impalpable, thou art the giver of life; lord of all, and lord of battles.  I present myself here before thee to say some few words concerning the need of the poor people of none estate or intelligence.  When they lie down at night they have nothing, nor when they rise up in the morning; the darkness and the light pass alike in great poverty.  Know, O Lord, that thy subjects and servants suffer a sore poverty that can not be told of more than that it is a sore poverty and desolateness.  The men have no garments, nor the women, to cover themselves with, but only certain rags rent in every part, that allow the air and the cold to pass everywhere.

“With great toil and weariness they scrape together enough for each day, going by mountain and wilderness seeking their food; so faint and enfeebled are they that their bowels cleave to their ribs, and all their body reechoes with hollowness, and they walk as people affrighted, the face and body in likeness of death.  If they be merchants, they now sell only cakes of salt and broken

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pepper; the people that have something despise their wares, so that they go out to sell from door to door, and from house to house; and when they sell nothing they sit down sadly by some fence or wall, or in some corner, licking their lips and gnawing the nails of their hands for the hunger that is in them; they look on the one side and on the other at the mouths of those that pass by, hoping peradventure that one may speak some word to them.