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as the intermediate Being nearest to the Sun, and received the same sort of homage from the Cherokee as the same element did from Eastern Magi. This was extended to Smoke. Smoke was deemed Fire's Messenger, always in readiness to convey the petition on high. A child, immediately after birth, was sometimes waved over fire. Children would be brought before fire and its guardian care entreated for them. Hunters, also, would wave their moccasins and leggings over fire, to secure protection from snakes; and it was a custom, in very remote times, for the same reason, to put chickens, as soon as hatched, into a kind of open basket and wave them over fire. There are old Cherokee who consider fire as having first descended direct from above. Others speak of it as an active and an intelligent being, in the form of a man, and dwelling in distant regions beyond wide waters whence their ancestors came. Some represent a portion of it as having been brought with them and sacredly guarded. Others pretend that after crossing the wide waters, they sent back for it to the Man of Fire, from whom a little was conveyed over by a spider, wrapped in her web. It was thenceforward, they say, kept in their original National Heptagon, - or rather, in a hole or cave dug under it; but this