there were visible the white huts of the " negro
quarter" of a cotton plantation. On the long
spit of the nearest sand-bar, lay a putrid lump
which had once been a bullock, and, tumbling
over and fighting for it, were swarming masses
of turkey buzzards.

Again our converse fell on snakes. Apropos
of some remarks on the great floods which are
almost periodical on this great fickle river, the
captain, bending his astute yet kindly eyes on me,
told me how once, during one of those great
inundations that reach for miles, when all the
stream was alive with drifts of broken steam-
boats, fallen trees, cotton bales, and here and
there dead men, he was in a steam-boat at
Napoleon, at the mouth of the Arkansas river,
when a backwoodsman came on board with a
huge dead rattlesnake twisted round him. He
had found it, he told the marvelling passengers,
floating on a black locust-tree which the river
had undermined and washed down from its banks.
These floods, said Vaughan, destroy a great
many snakes, and the snakes have a great dread
of the floods.

The captain then went on to describe, when a
prairie is on fire, the terror, anguish, and fury of
the snakes. Some hunters even said that at those
times they bit themselves and so died before the
fire could reach them. They seemed thoroughly
conscious of the danger. But this story of
their suicide the captain doubted, because he
had himself once caught a very large rattlesnake,
taken it home, and tied it to a suspended washing
cord, where it could hiss and move but do no
harm, for he had slipped a piece of stick into its
mouth and tied it like a bit, with a string behind
its head. There he fed and kept it for some
days; but the snake, even when it had its head
free, never attempted to bite itself. As to the
popular notion that in times of danger the
mother snake opened its mouth and let the young
ones run down into its stomach for shelter, he
believed that it merely originated in finding live
snakes in the stomachs of others, which had,
perhaps, swallowed them for food.

I then inquired of the captain if he had ever
used eau de luce for snake bites, and if he knew
what it was? He said, smiling, that eau de luce
was a mere quack name for compound tincture of
ammonia, and that, undoubtedly, it was a good
thing; but he had known an old slave suck the
bites with great success, and with perfect
impunity to himself.

I asked the captain if snakes were gregarious?
The captain—after pointing to an alligator
which was just floating past, looking as like
a dead tree as a thing well could—went on
to say that though not generally gregarious,
he thought several often selected the same
places to hybernate: as he himself had once found
more than a score under a felled live oak-tree
he had to move with a gang of lumberers.
He chopped them up with his axe as small as
mincemeat in no time, he could tell me! He
had also a story of a narrow escape he had
had in the lower range of the Rocky
Mountains. Here the captain pulled out his pocketbook
and showed me a plan of the place which
he had made at the time, as that part of the
range had never before been trodden by white
man. I put the story in the first person, and
try to give it the effect of the captain's manner.

"I had been," he said, " prospecting all day
for minerals, and had found some copper and
lead, and some curious sulphur springs of, I
believe, a unique kind; and, coming back to my
camp, had lit my fire, and cooked some deer
meat; then, quite tired out, looked round to
select a convenient and sheltered place on which
to sleep. I chose out, at last, a place under a
high crumbly-looking rock not far from my
fire, and, loading my rifle, first bandaging
the lock and slipping it into my mackintosh-
case to guard it from the damp, I wrapped
myself like a mummy in my Mackinaw blanket
and laid down under the rock to sleep: intending
to rise early and push fast, to overtake my
men, who were a day's march ahead looking
after bears.

"I had a bad night, for rats or something or
other kept passing over me and half waking me.
About the grey of the morning, I roused myself
from that sort of torpid paralysed sense of
endurance that a prolonged nightmare throws you
in, and rose up on my elbow to see if my logs were
quite burnt out, or if there was, perhaps, enough
fire left to warm me some coffee, for the night
had been frosty and cold. I looked, and to my
horror saw a writhing heap of about thirty rattlesnakes
coiled or moving round the brands of my
fire. I had been sleeping under a rock which
was perforated by their holes, and my fire had
drawn them out by its alluring warmth. It
was these snakes I had felt moving over me in
my long nightmare.

"Loramussy, mister! How quick I did get on
my feet, sure; and as I ran off, I banged with
my rifle right among them, just to give them a
sort of parting blessing. But what harm I did
to them I never knew, for I did not care much
to go back to that hive of rattlesnakes."

Thanking the captain for his story, I
reminded him that, in the prairies, rattlesnakes
became gregarious from their habit of occupying
the holes of the prairie dogs: first eating their
landlords—a most ungenerous return for the
shelter afforded them.

The captain said that deer were very much
afraid of the rattlesnakes; but that sometimes
an old buck would face them, and leaping on
them, crush them by a succession of bounds and
jumps. Dogs, too, would sometimes face them,
and acquire a habit of seizing them at the back
of the head; but, if once bitten, the dogs lost all
courage afterwards.

The very same week of this conversation with
the captain, in perusing the Memphis Daily
Avalanche, I met with two singular snake
stories, and as my chapter is necessarily a mere
string of beads, and the stories are too good to
"whistle down the wind," I will tell them here.
The first had reference to a shrewd Yankee
smuggler, who, having lately to pass some
prohibited article into Canada, prepared a large