NOCTURXAL EXCURSIONS 203 



miles of country said to contain rattlesnakes and 

 copperheads, and he has seen only an occasional dead 

 specimen by the roadside. In the extreme Southern 

 States, however, poisonous snakes are more numer- 

 ous, and rattlesnakes of several species may be 

 hunted at night. Well does the writer remember 

 the consternation among the colored folk created by 

 his companion and himself during their nocturnal 

 hunts. ]^or can these simple people be blamed for 

 e\ancing astonishment at the apparition of two canvas- 

 clad figures entering the swamps at night, armed with 

 a powerful acetylene lamp, and emerging later with 

 canvas bags which writhed and pulsated with strug- 

 gling serpents. 



So difficult is it sometimes to discover specimens 

 in good " snakey " ground, that a friend of the writer 

 tried the novel plan of taking ^ath him a pair of 

 opera-glasses and surveying the bushes and grass from 

 some elevated point. With the glasses he once dis- 

 covered a young copperhead snake swallowing a 

 wood-mouse, presumably some fifty feet from him, 

 among some bushes, but after taking the glasses from 

 his eves and searchino^ carefully for the snake he 

 failed to find it. This happened in the fall, when 

 the ground was well covered with dead leaves, and 

 the gentleman declared that if the snake had crawled 

 away he would have heard it rustling through the 

 leaves. Several times the writer has noted the sim- 

 ilarity of the copperhead snake to autumnal foliage, 

 and one of the finest specimens added to his collec- 

 tion was discovered coiled within a short distance of 



