SOMETHING ABOUT SNAKES. 



491 



causes it may have come to pass that an antipathy to snakes was 

 engendered in my heart. 



My cousin Frank Buckland, with whom I was for some time 

 at school as a boy, had a fondness for keeping snakes in his pock- 

 ets, which was not shared by his schoolfellows, including me. 

 However this may have been, I have little recollection of any- 

 thing about snakes at that time, except that when I was a boy at 

 Eton there was a large snake exhibited one year at Windsor fair, 

 which pleased our juvenile fancy, as we were glad to see a snake 

 as described by Virgil positis novus exuviis, and we were delight- 

 ed to buy, for a very fancy price, a piece of the old skin that it 

 had shed. The next time that I met a snake the meeting was 

 bad for the snake. A friend was driving me in his buggy in the 

 suburbs of Calcutta with a fast-trotting horse, when a large snake 

 tried to cross the road in front of us. But the horse, not seeing or 

 not heeding it, trotted on, and a wheel of the buggy cut the snake 

 in half. We pulled up to examine the remains, and it turned out 

 to be only a large but harmless water-snake. 



It is hardly credible how long a time a man may live in India 

 without seeing snakes in his house, unless he looks about dili- 

 gently for them. Of course there is more chance of seeing them 

 out of doors, and especially out snipe-shooting, as the snake is an 

 amphibious sort of creature, with a special appetite for a juicy 

 young frog, whose home, not always a very happy one, is in the 

 rice-fields. What with the long-legged birds of the crane species 

 that stalk through the water, and the snakes who glide about in 

 the mud, or lie on the little earthen ridges which divide the rice- 

 fields for irrigation purposes, the frogs have a bad time of it. One 

 afternoon I was walking along one of the earthen ridges between 

 the rice-fields, looking for snipe on either side of me, when a few 

 yards in front of me there reared up three cobras, facing me with 

 hoods erect, and evidently " meaning venom." I fired a charge of 

 snipe-shot into them, and there was a great confusion of heads 

 and tails and bits of bodies, so that it would have been hard to 

 put a whole snake together again. This gave me a useful lesson 

 to keep a good lookout. One day I was out shooting with a friend 

 who trod on a snake, which promptly curled round his leg and 

 tried to bite through his gaiter. His gaiter was perfectly snake- 

 proof, but he did not think of that, and his efforts to shoot the 

 snake without hitting his own leg were so ludicrous that it was 

 hardly possible not to laugh, until we could hit the snake on the 

 head with a loading-rod and make it quit my friend's leg. 



Once we were spending a holiday at a little bungalow at the 

 seaside, to which we used to go occasionally for change of air, and 

 sea-bathing if the tide permitted it. We were walking along the 

 sandy beach, when we saw a large cobra, about five feet long, with 



