showman's blanket; still everywhere subtle, sudden
in quarrel, treacherous, cruel, malignant, and
deadly; still gliding, coiling, winding, springing,
fanged and devilish; the type of evil, the
favourite mask of Satan when he is bent on
special mischief; the only animal that seems
utterly opposed, and for ever antagonistic, to
man; the only animal men instinctively shun, and
at once, on seeing, prepare to do battle with to
the death.

The sun fell strong and burning on the glass,
yet they stirred not, but remained fixed in
their torpor and lethargy. A strange infatuation
seized me to twist out the screw and pass
my hand into the box; I wanted to handle those
little folds of striped black and white, to play
the snake charmer, or enact Cleopatra's royal
ending. I wanted to hold the wretches safely
behind their little gills of ears, as in years gone
by old Todhunter, the gamekeeper, taught me to
handle a ferret, and then prize open those thin
dark lines of mouths and examine the fangs, or
rather the stings. For I still disdain all modern
improvements, and violently refuse to believe
that the serpent bites and does not sting; it
is all very well to tell me that what frightened
people used to take for the quivering sting was
really the tongue, and of course perfectly harmless,
but I know better; I want to touch and feel
those horny black and white scales that lap the
animal all over. They must feel like—— Mercy
of Heaven ! now as I pass the thin corner of my
cambric handkerchief through the join in the
glass, there is actually a stealthy scarcely per-
ceptible movement towards the place of one of
the blunt shy heads ! With horrible murderous
quietude the other, too, now slowly drags out a
fold from the scaly knot in which the two bodies
were hitherto tied; now all the coils move in
terrible unanimity ; yet now again they remain
like one monster with twin heads, apparently in
unaroused torpidity and childlike trustfulness.
How like many a villanous biped I have known
and thus watched !

As I stood looking at those living servants
of death, secured there in their crystal prison,
two rough-looking countrymen from Wisconsin
came up, and could scarcely conceal their
disgust at finding that the snakes were not
stuffed, but alive. Even when they moved, one
of them said,

"I tell yer, Saul, it's all clockwork, so it is;
I warn't raised in the nor'-west for nothing—no,
sure!"

When I assured them that the man who
put his hand in that case and scratched the
head of either of those snakes would be a
"gone coon" in the space of about half an
hour, Saul got quite furious, and, spitting all
over the Smithsonian Institution, with the
greatest impartiality, swore " might he be bust
up, and after that salted down for use among the
niggers daown south, if he ever heard such a
darned foolish tiling as keeping two cussed
snakes, like gentlemen, all in a glass case."

Not caring to argue with the nor'-wester, I
sat down with him in one of the window
recesses, on the vertebra of a whale— a thing
rather bigger than a man-of-war's binnacle— and
proceeded to discuss snakes in general, and
American "sarpents" in particular.

They had both of them, Saul and Moses, often
killed rattlesnakes, "any quantity of them," in
the woods of Kentucky, whence they both came
—but I had better give the matter, as nearly as
I can, in their own language

"Lor, stranger," said Moses, " I've killed a
heap of snakes about the Green River—yes, sure;
and on the Mississippi banks, yes, I guess, a few.
I remember once when I was—yes—hunting
barrs one day in a cane-brake down at Green
River, that some one saying something about
snakes, put the darned spiteful critters all at
once in my mind, and I began to feel kinder
scared, and my hat to kinder lift up off my head,
as if my hair had turned to wire, for just then
I heern an awful hissing, like an angry cat, and
then the buzz of a rattle going so fast that it
seemed to show double, like a tight string
when you twang it backwards and forwards
with your finger. Lor a mercy, what a leap
I did make backwards! — seventeen feet if it
was an inch—a caution to Blondin, I guess.
Blue flugins, well my! if there warn't a snake
coiled up under a hickory-tree, with its head
up, its eye like a big diamond on fire, and
its rattle tattling like castanets gone mad.
Now, stranger, you must know the rattlesnake
don't leap, like other snakes, and that's a kinder
blessing to us 'Mericans, so I drew back another
two feet or so, fired both barrels of my gun
which happened to be loaded, slap into his coils,
and then finished him with a ' stockdologer'
from a sassafras bough—wopped him to pieces—
fact—yes, sir. When I cut off his rattles, I
found he had fifteen rows of 'em, and one of
these, 'cute people say, comes every year, so
that tarnation varmint must have been fifteen
year going about the world doing mischief!
Wonder how many Christians he had
slaughtered!"

On further questioning Saul and Moses, I
found that on opening this same rattlesnake's
mouth, he had discovered a white slime, which he
believed to be the poison, oozing through the
hollow teeth, behind which the serpent carries
his small pouches of portable death. The teeth, as
he tried to explain to me, and as indeed I knew it
already from actual examination, acted at once as
lancets and injectors. They puncture a wound,
and at the same instant that they punch two
equidistant holes, project into them the poison.
Providence, when it gave the bull its crescent
horns, the stag its antlers, the bear its paws,
and the tiger its teeth, gave the snake, in these
hollow fangs, weapons of offence and of defence
not less terrible.

The rattlesnake, Moses assured me, seldom,
except perhaps when it had its young round it,
pursued its enemy; always, if possible, stole
away and avoided the combat; but, if trod on by
the hunter, or driven into a corner whence it was
impossible for it to escape, it instantly flew at
the unlucky intruder.