the shadowy races with which the land was peopled. Tradition says they were white men who came from the north-east in companies, some by sea and some by land; twenty thousand of these emigrants, led by a dignified old chief, are said to have come at once. They are described as a good-looking people, wearing long white tunics, sandals and straw hats. They were mostly farmers and skilled mechanics, and were peaceable, orderly and enterprising. They had left their own land, Huehue-Tlapallan, after a struggle of years with the barbarous tribes around them, and made their way south to Mexico—a country with which it is probable they had been familiar as traders. Many suppose that these immigrants were the same people as the Mound-Builders of our own country—that strange, nameless race whose earthworks astonish the archaeologist of today. Tools which these old workmen left behind them in the Ohio Valley and elsewhere are made of a kind of flint which is not found nearer than Mexico. Shells which must have come from the Gulf of Mexico have also been found buried in the graves of the Mound-Builders, showing that ages ago these people must have trafficked with those who lived along its shores. When war disturbed them in their home at the North, the more enterprising of them migrated to Mexico and built cities and temples on the same general plan as those erected by their forefathers, but of so much more substantial materials that many of them have outlasted the centuries which have come and gone since they appeared among the southern tribes. These people went by the name of "Toltecs" among their Mexican neighbors and successors. When the later tribes came to have a written history—as they did about four hundred years afterward—they ascribed
