-jS THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



I ran downstairs and found him breatMess and pale with ex- 

 citement at the door. The snake, he said, was fully twenty feet 

 long. It had pursued him a little way through the bushes and 

 then disappeared in a hole in the bank. " Aha ! " thought I, " this 

 must be the great Natal python I have heard so much about but 

 never seen." With some doubts, nevertheless, about his being 

 twenty feet long for people usually imagine snakes which scare 

 them to be much bigger than they really are I took my snake- 

 hunting stick and set off at once to make the capture. On arriv- 

 ing at the pond, which was overhung by poplar trees and nearly 

 dried up, the boy led me across a long stretch of hardened, sun- 

 baked mud to a point in the great earthen dam about twenty feet 

 over from the water's edge, where there was a hole, the mouth of 

 which he had carefully stopped up with a good-sized stone before 

 coming to tell me. This I removed, and as the snake was not there 

 ready to bolt out as I expected, I ran in the stick to dislodge him. 

 This, however, had no effect. So, taking a piece of stout paling 

 wire, I made with it a hook to the end of my snake stick. Run- 

 ning in this arrangement, I managed to catch it in his folds, a pro- 

 ceeding which he resented by slipping it off and by many angry 

 hissings which sounded all the louder from being uttered in the 

 confinement of his subterranean retreat. After several failures 

 he was at last hauled out. " A cobra, by Jove ! " said I, as he 

 raised himself up erect with expanded hood on the hard -mud ex- 

 panse between me and the water. As his head when standing thus 

 was fully eighteen inches high, it was no easy matter to press his 

 neck to the ground so as to catch him safely with my hand. 

 Without at all hurting him I made several attempts to get his 

 neck down, and not without some nervousness, for he might at 

 any moment send a charge of venom into my face. This playing 

 him with the stick to get him into proper position so aroused and 

 alarmed him that at last, overcome by his own excitement, he 

 suddenly collapsed, falling over on his side and lying there mo- 

 tionless, half on his back, with his mouth fixedly open and stiff as 

 if in death. His whole body was rigidly contorted and as unbend- 

 ing as a dried stick. " Ah, you've killed him ! " shouted the boy 

 from the top of the dam, whither he had retreated for safety. 

 However, as I had seen this manifestation before, I knew that it 

 was only a hysterical fit. Warning the lad not to approach, I 

 picked up the apparently lifeless snake by the tail-tip and flung 

 him off from me to a distance of five or six feet. As soon as he 

 touched the ground all his life was active again. Up he stood in- 

 stantly with expanded hood as before, the black eyes glistening 

 angrily and the forked tongue running out quiveringly from the 

 closed mouth as if daring me to approach. A slight touch with 

 the stick on the neck caused him to fall down in a second fit simi- 



