SERPENT-CHARM. 609 



have to crawl a long way before they could find a frog. In the sterile 

 border-land of north Mexico and southern Texas swamps and frogs 

 are hardly known to the untraveled natives, while the frequency of 

 poisonous reptiles is almost unparalleled ; and on a recent visit to the 

 lower Rio Grande I found that the trade in living serpents, scorpions, 

 and tarantulas has become a regular branch of industry, which in 

 Cameron County, Texas, and Matamoras alone, employs a dozen profes- 

 sional and twenty or thirty juvenile amateurs. In a state of captivity 

 these animals fast with the stoicism of an othodox fakir, so that the 

 question of their proper diet becomes comparatively unimportant ; but 

 out in the prairie the embonpoint of the copperheads and yellow rattle- 

 snakes suggests eupeptic habits and a liberal food-supply, though the 

 arid soil yields neither frogs nor moles. Birds there are, in abundance ; 

 but how can the most subtle serpent secure them without incurring 

 the suspicion of witchcraft ? The opinions of the natives differ as 

 widely as those of the above scientists. Among the less transcendental 

 ones, some hold that the vivoras hunt in night-time, others that they 

 poison the berries of the taxus-tree and surprise the birds while they 

 are prostrated by a fit of gastritis. A rather intelligent ranchero, who 

 had hauled a load of ice water and comestibles for a picnic party of 

 American merchants and Mexican army officers, was present when the 

 autopsy of an overgrown rattlesnake elicited a series of half -digested 

 singing birds, and explained that the Rio Grande vivoras could only 

 indulge in such luxuries since the establishment of the International 

 Telegraph line, which caused the death of so many swift-flying birds 

 that came in contact with the wires. This theory might satisfy the 

 Spanish- American officers, but not an Anglo-American druggist, who 

 had visited the upland prairies on his botanical excursions and had 

 reasons to believe that the prosperity of the wily ophidians was not 

 materially affected by the absence of telegraphic facilities. So he ap- 

 plied to one of the leading vivora-catchers and a week before my arri- 

 val in Matamoras obtained a pair of good-sized yellow rattlesnakes, 

 which he added to a more or less happy family of lizards and black- 

 snakes in an empty room of his suburban cottage. 



Reptilians, said he, are generally inexpensive boarders ; his four liz- 

 ards content themselves with a daily fly apiece, and one old horned 

 toad has pursued the road of total abstinence to a length where even 

 Dio Lewis would hesitate to follow ; but some snakes make an excep- 

 tion : the Coluber palusiris, or water-blacksnake, is almost insatiable, 

 and the common blacksnake insists on his three daily meals with a 

 firmness that would disgust the business-managers of a fasting girl. 

 The rattlesnakes, too, began to crawl about and ply their tongues in a 

 way that suggested a growing interest in the table-d'hdte arrangements 

 of their new hotel, and cast furtive glances at a little mouse which had 

 been introduced in anticipation of their wishes. 



But, either through fastidiousness or a mistaken notion of duty to- 



TOL. XV. 39 



