the head of a toad, the belly of a snake, the poison of a black spider, and strange herbs gathered by moonlight. The whole mixed in a cauldron over a fire fed with dead men's bones, and boiled between midnight and dawn. Every thoroughbred Cuban believes in ghosts and haunted houses. To this day certain plantations stand desolate, because nobody will face the spirits which haunt them--proof, if proof were needed, of the awful crimes committed within their walls. Before Tacon's time, such high roads as there were in the interior of the island were very unsafe, and gangs of banditti infested various parts of the country. They waylaid travellers, murdered them, and stripped their bodies. Many years ago a well-known lawyer at Porto Principe was arrested and charged with organising and financing a gang of monteros who had turned highwaymen, and killed and plundered various wealthy travellers on their way to certain plantations in the interior. In the course of his trial it transpired that the bodies of the victims were buried under the kitchen floor of a wayside _fonda_ (inn), the precise spots having been revealed to a negro seer by the ghosts of the slain. To this day, nobody will pass that _fonda_ on All Souls Eve, because they are sure to see the spirits of the murdered men barring the road, and supplicating the passer-by to have a mass and _de profundis_ offered for the repose of their unshriven souls. Divers plantations have an evil reputation because negroes have been burnt there in days long gone by for practising the rites of Obi, or because their cruel masters desired to get rid of them, for reasons of their own. When the tempest is at its height, you may yet see, wandering among the palm trees, a black form wreathed in flames, whose wailing shriek rises even above the howling of the storm. The superstitions of the blacks affected the whites: it could hardly be otherwise; for, however strong caste prejudice may be, the dominant race must absorb some proportion of the prejudices inherent in those who have nursed and waited on them in their tenderest and most impressionable years. Cases have occurred, and may occur even now, in which white men and women of the lowest class have joined in the strange and repellent rites of the African religion, if so it can be called. But I need hardly say that the more educated Cubans, though they admit the existence of a strange and mysterious faculty in certain of the negro priests and priestesses, hold themselves utterly aloof from such demoniac and degrading practices.