In Mr Wilson’s opinion, the charge of witchcraft often arises from envy, or from spite; and sickness for the purposes of revenge is sometimes simulated. A neighbour wants a house or garden, and the owner either requires more than he wishes to pay, or refuses to sell it at all. Covetousness consumes his heart, and the witch-ghost is brought into action. Then the covetous person, or his child, or a neighbour, falls ill, or feigns illness; the ailment baffles the skill of the physician, and the witch-finder is called in. Then all is smooth sailing and little is left to chance. In the early days of the Mission at Zimmé, Christians were very unfavourably looked on by the officials. This may partly have arisen from what I consider to have been, under the circumstances, an injudicious act of a missionary. An old temple-ground was handed over to the missionaries as a compound for their houses and schools. The temple was in ruins, but a sandstone image of Buddha, five feet in height, was intact, and was much reverenced by the people, who placed offerings of fruit and flowers before it. The missionaries used the ruins of the temple for levelling the ground, and buried the image under the _débris_. One day during some alterations it was dug up, and the people swarmed into the compound to pay their respects to it, although it had lost its head. The missionary then took an axe and knocked it to pieces before the people, who were naturally horrified and offended at the, to them, sacrilegious deed. The people were still more disgusted by seeing the pedestal upon which the image had been seated turned into a garden seat, and the fragments of the image made into a rockery. Another cause of friction arose in 1869 from two new converts neglecting to aid in repairing the palisading round the outer city when instructed to do so by the officials. The missionaries believed that the affair arose merely from a misunderstanding. Anyhow, the two converts were seized, and fastened with ropes passed through the holes in their ear-laps to the upper beams of a house, and next day clubbed to death. The missionaries complained to the King of Siam, and a Siamese official was sent up to inquire into the case. The King of Zimmé, being bound to Siam only so far as tribute and his foreign relations were concerned, answered the commissioner by stating that it was his affair and not Siam’s, and that he intended to kill as many of his own people as he chose. It was not till nine years afterwards, in the present king’s reign, five years after the appointment of the Siamese commissioner at Zimmé, that a proclamation, issued by the Siamese Government, declaring that any of the Siamese Shans might change their religion with impunity, was allowed to be placarded up in the Court of Zimmé. At the time of my visit, the missionaries had made nearly two hundred converts and were much respected by the princes and the people.