These were the mothers of the race of men.

Or again, it was said that a certain king had a huge gourd which contained all the waters of the earth; four brothers, who coming into the world at one birth had cost their mother her life, ventured to the gourd to fish, picked it up, but frightened by the old king's approach, dropped it on the ground, broke it into fragments, and scattered the waters over the earth, forming the seas, lakes, and rivers, as they now are.

These brothers in time became the fathers of a nation, and to them they traced their lineage.[78-2] With the previous examples before our eyes, it asks no vivid fancy to see in these quaternions once more the four winds, the bringers of rain, so swift and so slippery.
The Navajos are a rude tribe north of Mexico.

Yet even they have an allegory to the effect that when the first man came up from the ground under the figure of the moth-worm, the four spirits of the cardinal points were already there, and hailed him with the exclamation, "Lo, he is of our race."[79-1] It is a poor and feeble effort to tell the same old story.
The Haitians were probably relatives of the Mayas of Yucatan.

Certainly the latter shared their ancestral legends, for in an ancient manuscript found by Mr.Stephens during his travels, it appears they looked back to four parents or leaders called the Tutul Xiu.