In the morning I noticed the _zopilotes_ (vultures) hovering over the field in the direction I had taken the night before, and upon going to the spot I found an enormous full-grown jaguar lying dead about ten feet from the edge of the clearing. Several shot had penetrated his head and body, and luckily, one entering his neck had passed under the shoulder-blade and through the heart. The natives said it was the only jaguar that had been seen in that locality for years, and it was the only one I saw during the whole of my travels in Mexico. That morning it was discovered that every hut in the settlement at the mill had been vacated during the night, and there was not a piece of furniture or a native anywhere in sight; the place looked as desolate as a country-graveyard. Later in the day we found the whole crowd encamped back in the woods, and were told that during the night an Evil Spirit in the form of a white man with his face and clothes all bespattered with blood, had visited the settlement, and wielding a huge machete, also covered with blood, had threatened to kill every man, woman and child in the place. A few years prior to that an American had been foully murdered at the mill by a native, who used a machete in the operation, and this, they said, was the second time in five years that the murdered man had returned in spirit-form to wreak vengeance on the natives. It was more than three months before they could all be induced to return to the houses. I cannot imagine what sort of an apparition it was that molested them the first time. The frightened native and his wife had doubtless returned and alarmed the others with a highly exaggerated story, and gathering up their few belongings they had fled for their lives. I told the foreman the circumstances, but he strongly advised me not to attempt to undeceive them, because they had a deepseated superstition about the mill, and no amount of explanation would convince them that the place was not haunted by the spirit of the murdered man, especially as this was their second alarm. The peon class in Mexico are exceedingly superstitious and there is scarcely an act or circumstance but what portends some evil in the mind of one or another. About the only thing about which they have no superstitious misgivings is the act of carrying off something that does not belong to them.