In printing the MS. of Xahila, I have encountered certain difficulties which have been only partially surmounted. As the Cakchiquel, though a written, is not a printed tongue, there has no rule been established as to the separation of verbs and their pronominal subjects, of nouns and their possessive pronouns, of the elements of compound particles, of tense and mode signs, etc. In the MSS. the utmost laxity prevails in these respects, and they seem not to have been settled points in the orthography of the tongue. The frequent elisions and euphonic alterations observable in these compounds, prove that to the native mind they bore the value of a single word, as we are aware they did from a study of the structure of this class of languages. I have, therefore, felt myself free to exercise in the printed page nearly the same freedom which I find in the MS. At first, this will prove somewhat puzzling to the student of the original, but in a little while he will come to recognize the radical from its augment without difficulty. Another trouble has been the punctuation. In the original this consists principally of dashes and commas, often quite capriciously distributed. Here also, I have been lax in reducing the text to the requirements of modern standards, and have left much latitude to the reader to arrange it for himself. Capital letters are not often used in the original to distinguish proper names, and as the text has been set up from a close copy of the first text, some irregularities in this respect also must be anticipated. The paragraphs numbered in the text are distinctly marked in the original, but are not numbered there. The numerals have been added for convenience of reference. FOOTNOTES: [10-1] Dr. Otto Stoll, _Zur Ethnographie der Republik Guatemala_, p. 157 (Zurich, 1884), on the phonetic laws which have controlled the divergence of the two tongues, Cakchiquel and Maya. See the same writer in his “Supplementary Remarks on a Grammar of the Cakchiquel Language,” translated by Dr. D. G. Brinton, in _Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society_, for 1885. [10-2] _Recordacion Florida, Discurso Historial, Natural, Material, Militar y Politico del Reino de Goathemala._ Lib. II, Chap. I. [10-3] _Myths of the New World_, p. 181; _American Hero-Myths_, pp. 44, 73, 80, 162, etc. [11-1] “Cuatro generosos mancebos, nobles hermanos,” says Fuentes y Guzman, _Recordacion Florida_, Lib. I, Cap. II. The story of the four brothers who settled Guatemala is repeated by Torquemada, _Monarchia Indiana_, Lib. XI, Cap. XVII, and other writers. [11-2] _The Maya Chronicles_, 109-122 (Library of Aboriginal American Literature, Vol. I). For the evidence of the wholly mythical character of the Toltecs, and of their “King,” Quetzalcoatl, see my _American Hero-Myths_, Chapter III. (Philadelphia, 1882).