Was there any cure for a rattlesnake bite?
I had heard that eau de luce was thought a
specific in India in cases of bites from the dreaded
cobra, or hooded snake, of Hindostan.

"Wa'al," answered Moses, " I tell you what,
mister; a bite from a rattlesnake is always 'a
cawshun,' that's sure ; but there is one thing
that is good for it, if taken in time, and that's
whisky."

Then Moses went on to tell me many instances
of the efficacy of whisky ; and indeed, while I
was in America, I read in the Carolina and
Virginia newspapers numerous cases in which
whisky had proved a remedy in dangerous
snake bites. Saul now came forward, and
speaking up very nasally, but still like a man,
told us a story of an old "niggur" on his
father's plantation " daown south," somewhere
near Jackson's landing on the Mississippi, who
had saved himself in this way after a bite.
Directly after the fangs went in, he tied a
handkerchief above the place (it was in his leg), and
washed the punctures first with water and then
with whisky : for already it began to swell and feel
sore. He then drank off all the rest of the bottle
till he was quite drunk— it always in these cases
takes more whisky than usual to make a man
drunk— and then staggered home. Next morning,
he awoke with his leg swollen and sore, but
otherwise as well as usual ; and in a week or two
he was quite recovered, and able to go about at
cotton hoeing.

Moses backed up this narrative by assuring me
that once, riding through a Kentucky forest, a
rattlesnake bit a chesnut mare he was on, in the
off-hind leg just above the pastern. He
instantly got off, washed the wound with whisky,
and poured a drench into the mare's mouth.
She winced, kicked a little, and shuddered as
if her blood were chilled, but next day she was
all well again, aud three weeks afterwards she
won a trotting match at Nashville.

Saul here interposed, and snatching me out
of the hand of Moses, drew my attention to the
fact of the rattlesnake's being unable to leap like
the puff-adder or the cotton-mouth. This
rendered the rattlesnake much more harmless than
it otherwise would have been.

This fact, indeed, rendered it easy to escape
from a rattlesnake when you came suddenly upon
it in a wood for instance, by a vigorous leap backward.
A story is told in America relative to
this. On one occasion, one of their generals
(Jackson or Taylor) was bivouacking by night,
during the old war, in a log hut which the troops
had found in a lonely wood. The general and
his suite had hardly well settled down to sleep,
when a tremendous and multitudinous hissing
showed them that a whole army of
rattlesnakes was sheltering itself in the room below.
Indeed, by the light of a blazing pine knot, they
could look down between the gaping planks of
the floor, and see the " sarpents" coiling and
hissing, like so many eels in the well of a punt.
The suite instantly " made tracks," and cleared
out to light a fire in the open air, or sleep round
the fires the soldiers had already lighted. But the
general, calm and unshaken, well knowing the
constitution of rattlesnakes and their manners,
having ascertained that the floor he lay on was
too far above them for the snakes to reach, and
knowing they could not leap, lay down on the
planks, and, though hissed to sleep, enjoyed one
of the best nights' rest he obtained during the
war.

I asked Moses about the cotton-mouth
snake: having told him, in return for his
information, a story about " the barber's-pole" of
Jamaica—a snake striped alternately with black
and vermilion—and also about a certain snake
of South America, whose bite is so deadly,
that no one was ever yet known to survive it.

Moses hereupon told me that the cotton-
mouth was a snake very common in Carolina
and elsewhere. It was remarkable for the fact
of the inside of its mouth being covered with
a white woolly filament resembling cotton.
Its bite was peculiarly deadly. As to the
whisky theory, the presumption amongst the
planters who used the remedy was, that the virus
of the snake exercised a certain chilling
paralysing effect over the blood, which eventually, if
unchecked, would retard the circulation so much
as to produce death. The poison, too, appeared
to have a dangerous local effect. There had
been cases where persons recovering from snake
bites had had the wounds turn into running
sores, which had remained painful and
unhealable for months.

I need not say that our agreeable conversation
ended as all American conversations do end.
Saul and Moses cut themselves fresh "plugs,"
put their hands in their pockets, and strolled
off towards a case of stuffed birds—among
which the black and orange oriole was
specially conspicuous—without bow, nod, or any
other customary parting salutation. But I had
learned to bear with these harmless things:
if travelling does not teach one toleration, what
will teach one?

It was some weeks before snakes creeped
again into my thoughts. This next time I was in
the luxurious library of a New York magnate, in
a house whose splendour literally blazed in
comparison with the starved impoverished palaces
of Genoa, Rome, or Venice. I was in the stripling
world, as near the heart of civilisation as in
England, and was with a man at whose bidding the
winged messages to Paris or Peru and the Stock
Exchange couriers flew " du Pérou jusqu'à
Rome." There were bronzes on the buffet, and
golden clocks to "tick off" Time's account;
there were trophies of arms over the mantelpiece ;
and glowing in the midst, almost as if
a lamp were shining behind it, hung a round
buckler of rhinoceros horn from Central Nubia,
transparent and luminously golden as though it
were of amber.

My friend Mr. Vanderpump—for he was a
Dutch merchant born in a quaint Spanish house
in Amsterdam—turning, as he talked to me about
snakes, lay in a long red and blue hammock made
of aloe thread netted by an Indian of Guatemala,
with one leg not ungracefully hanging over its