"Fcr Richer for Poorer' ' 3 1 



to the Museum. There, by the most inexcusable careless- 

 ness, it was mislaid and so badly eaten by Dermestes that 

 few of the specimens ever finally reached the collection. 



At Lucknow, in India, we went out to a village with a 

 friend of our bearer, Amir Hassein. This friend lived in a 

 village within easy driving distance. Amir had spoken of 

 the fact that his master (meaning me) was obviously crazy, 

 as he was interested in snakes and other loathsome crea- 

 tures. It seemed that a giant cobra lived in an abandoned 

 rodent burrow near a path between the friend's village and 

 a stream where the women went to draw water. In passing 

 along this way at night, because it was cooler then, several 

 people had trod on this cobra. Only a few days before, a 

 child had been bitten and had died. 



Now of course they could not kill the cobra. You re- 

 member that when Buddha was asleep under the Bo tree, 

 the cobra came up and spread its hood to shade his sleep- 

 ing eyes. The Master blessed the cobra then; and if you 

 don't believe it, how do you explain the fact that the two 

 finger marks are to be seen on the cobra's hood? So nat- 

 urally the cobra is sacred, and no native was going to risk 

 his prospects of the hereafter by killing it. But no one 

 cared a rap about my chances in the hereafter, and if I 

 killed the cobra, so much the better. 



We trudged out across the dusty plain and came at last 

 to the little hole where the villagers said the cobra lived. 

 I had an old entrenching tool which I used to dig insects out 

 of rotten logs, and with this I commenced to enlarge the 

 hole, cutting down in the hard-baked earth. I got down 

 about a foot before I saw what was obviously skin of either 



