margin—Vanderpump, smoking one of those fiery
Trichinopoly cheeroots which have ventilating
straws inserted through their centres— harangued
me pleasantly about certain deserted gold mines
of the Spaniards, which it would take no great
time, he said, by dint of Indian tradition, to
rediscover ; from this subject he wandered on, by
many pleasant devious by-paths of converse, to
the subject of certain snakes of enormous size
supposed to exist in "tarns" or small lakes
among a certain range of mountains in South
America.

I roused up at this and prepared to listen.
Vanderpump then—rolling round in his
hammock, which, stretching from either wall,
drooped down and swung within two or three
feet of the ground—drew several yards of the
coloured netting over him as if for warmth, and
prepared to pour out upon me his "winged
words."

He told me that many Indians and hunters
had assured him that they had seen these
enormoussnakes. They were twice as large as boa
constrictors, and were generally discerned bathing
themselves in the mountain lakes, where it
was supposed they came to feed on the fish.
They had, however, never yet been killed or found
dead, nor was it known on what they usually
fed, or where they lived. He (Vanderpump)
being a liberal in science as in politics, saw
no reason to doubt that a few specimens of
some extinct Pythonic race of serpents might
still be existing among those rarely trodden
mountains. Races of animals had died out of
particular countries in our own time. The
dodo was an instance. Even in the sea-serpent
many sensible people retained a belief.

If the boa constrictor that can battle with a
buffalo or an alligator, and swallow a deer,
antlers and all, were to become extinct to-day;
to-morrow, but for printed records, there would
be people found to deny that such a monster had
ever existed. Because a certain creature had
not yet been classified by stay-at-home zoologists,
that was no proof, he urged, it did not exist.
The mammoth was wonderful, and its skeleton
had been found; whereas the backbone of a
large snake presents little resistance to the
violent extremes of South American climate.

I asked Vanderpump, who I knew had dabbled
in medicine, whether, in the course of his South
American travels, he had tried to discover new
and valuable drugs, and, above all, any specific
for snake bits?

He said, oscillating himself with lazy grandeur,
that he had; he had several times in
Nicaragua and Guatemala been on the brink of great
discoveries. He had once been presented with
a herb, which the peons told him was a certain
cure for small-pox, but he tried it on one of his
own Spanish servants who was ill, and it proved
useless. The plant seemed a remedy, only to
the Indian constitution and in the Indian
climate. There was, however, one pulverised
herb which the peons used as snuff in cases of
low fever, by which he had himself been cured
when dangerously ill. Yet he had tried in vain
to obtain a specimen of it ; all offers of money
were refused. They would not even gather it,
except at night, for fear of being seen.

"And why all this precaution, this dog-in-the-
manger caution?"

Because the Indians said that when the white
man used one of their medicines it lost all its
virtue. It had been so with jalap and with
Peruvian bark. They were therefore determined
to keep this wonderful diaphoretic and sudatory
to themselves. He dried leaves of every herb
and tree he could find in the neighbourhood,
yet in vain. In all his searches he never
discovered a specific against snake bites. On
the contrary, so much was a certain sort of
snake dreaded there, that, if one was killed, all
the people of the neighbourhood would go out
and solemnly burn the body to ashes, for fear of
any life being left in it.

Vanderpump then went on to tell me of his
having been once bitten, on the bank of a river,
by a snake that had crept into an eel-hole. But
this bite ended with a mere slight inflammation,
and he supposed that the virus must have been
neutralised by the water; or, more likely, the
aggressive snake was a harmless one.

I had not many snake stories of my own
experience to exchange with Vanderpump in
return; but what I had, I told without broidery or
lace-work of imagination. I described how
an eccentric friend of mine, first an officer,
then a clergyman, and a conscientious man in
both capacities, with whom I spent several
pleasant summers, used to delight in taming the
harmless snakes, common in English hedgerows.
He kept them by day in his pocket or
hat, by night in a bandbox in the room I slept
in; and well I remember the tremendous round
and round scramble one morning, when one of
them swallowed whole, a large frog, which had
been shut up with him for his consumption.

From this, I harmlessly episoded into an
account of a pretty peasant girl in Normandy whom
I had seen twine live lizards lightly between the
heavy lustrous black folds of her tiara of hair,
where they glowed like coils of living emerald.
I then (just as coffee came up like so much
smoking incense) asked Vanderpump if it was
really true that travelling quacks in America
made a living by killing rattlesnakes for their fat?

He said it was indeed; that snake fat was
excellent for sprains and bruises, and had been
used in such cases, for centuries, by the Indians.

It was some days after I parted from Vanderpump,
and I was on the Mississippi, on the
hurricane-deck of a first-class racing steamer;
my feet were on planks covered with leaf
lead to prevent the wood sparks charring
them. Above us and behind us, rose the glazed
tower of a pilot-house. I was seated on an
armchair, side by side with my dear friend Captain
Vaughan, skipper of a Californian steamer.
From this " coign of vantage" we looked down
on the brown turbid river, on the pelicans, and
on the brown sand-bars.

The crumbling banks of the great river were
mere wrecks of fallen cotton-trees, and here and