As it was now midday and no start could be made for the ruins till next morning at dawn, he proposed we should go out peccary shooting, and we sent down to the boat for our guns. Our hosts donned the most wonderful Mexican shooting-boots reaching almost to their waists, decorated with tassels of string. They had some half a dozen fine boarhounds, one of the dogs, a redoubtable hunter, bearing many a scar from duels with jaguars and the wild pig, the male of which latter, always heavily tusked, often accounts for two or three dogs before he is bagged. It was a picturesque afternoon we spent in the woods. The five Spaniards were keen sportsmen, if a trifle reckless in the angles at which they held their guns. The beating through the dense undergrowth was something of a "follow-my-leader," and we spent most of the time looking down their barrels, realistically literal personifications of "the man behind the gun." The peccary were not at home, but one of the party bagged a superb specimen of the _hoco_, as large as the largest gobbler turkey, with crested head, its feathers all of gold and bronze. While we were supping the leather-clad _vaquero_ returned with the Mexican workman who was to act as guide, and who, under severe cross-examination, seemed to sustain the reputation of the rumoured cenote. So it was arranged that at dawn a whole party of us should make a day of it, the administrator prettily assuming a positive archæological zeal (alas! he will never do so again) and giving generous orders for the preparation of the picnic baskets. It is sad to reflect that man's pleasure is so largely dependent upon untimely deaths in the animal world, and we fear that the arranging for our archæological woodland junketings of the morrow was answerable for a porcine tragedy which was enacted while we took our coffee. The stone-floored room in which we supped opened out into the kitchen yard, and, in the friendly way to which we had now become quite accustomed, chickens, turkeys, and pigs ran through the room at intervals; one of the latter affording the dogs quite a boar-hunt between our legs and those of the chairs. We had dined both wisely and well, and were contentedly smoking the strong Mexican cigarettes when piercing shriek after shriek rent the night air. A poor pig was going the way of all flesh at the hands of the Mexican cook, not at a respectful distance from our Lucullus-like feast but actually at the door with its head in a pail; and its piteous cries, ending in a last gurgle as the knife did its brutal work, like the writing on the wall of the banqueting hall of Belshazzar, shook our nerves.