When visiting Dr Peoples, the physician attached to the Mission, he told me of a strange case of hysteria which arose from the belief of the Shans in evil spirits. There was a man living in the northern quarter of the city who possessed a garden of areca palms and plantains. In the garden was a well, the abode of a Pee-Hong, or headless spirit: all deceased murderers, adulterers, and other people who have been executed become Pee-Hong. In its way to and from this well the Pee-Hong passed through a grove of trees, which the owner, against the wishes of his neighbours, who feared the wrath of the demon, determined to cut down. A short time after the trees had been destroyed he became very uneasy and unwell; and whenever thinking or talking on the subject, figures appeared on his limbs and body, in the form of regular welts, shaped like leaves and trunks and whole trees—sometimes resembling plantain-trees, at others areca palms. Having tried every form of exorcism, he applied to Dr Peoples for help through his medical assistant, but refused to display the spirit manifestations before him, saying that they would not appear before Christians. The doctor prescribed for the man, and went to visit him the next day at his house, but he had left his family and started for a famous shrine. Many months had passed since then, but nothing further had been heard of the demoniac. The belief in the transmigration of the soul into the bodies of animals is apt to give rise to a peculiar form of hallucination. In one of the Siamese books a tale is told of a wife plotting the death of her affectionate husband with her paramour, and, on the success of the plot, marrying the latter. Soon afterwards the woman noticed a snake in the house, which she thought must be her late husband, as she imagined it looked lovingly upon her. After killing the snake she had a cow which she killed for the same reason. Then she had a dog which followed her everywhere with affectionate watchfulness, and she, thinking her husband’s soul must be in it, killed it. After the dog’s death a child was born, who, because it looked at her with loving eyes, she thought must be her husband. Not daring to cut short its life, and unable to bear the sight of it, she gave it out to be nursed. When the child grew up, it is said to have remembered the various migrations of its soul from the time that it was the husband of its own mother, and to have told the story to its grandmother. CHAPTER XI.