WHAT THE PYTHON DID. 77 
food, as it would otherwise have done every time. The snake 
was then placed out in the warm sunshine for half a day, the 
ligature was removed, and it was then put back into its cage 
again until next feeding time. 
CROCKERY-SMASHING PYTHON. 
When out hunting one day in Natal we captured a Python, 
about seventeen or eighteen feet long. My Dutch friend brought 
it in next day to me in a mealie sack. He dumped it down in 
my chemical room at the Museum, the walls of which were covered 
with shelves on which hundreds of jars of specimens in spirits, 
and lots of empty glass jars, were stored. We could not get a 
cage ready that day for the Python, so, thinking he would be 
safe in the sack till the following day, I locked him up and went 
home. 
WHAT THE PYTHON DID. 
You want to know what the Python did? Why, he somehow 
or other got out of the sack during the night, and explored every 
inch of each shelf in the room, seeking some hole through which 
to escape. Finding none, he coiled himself up in a ball on the 
topmost shelf and went to sleep. He left an odd bottle here and 
there on the shelves, thinking I might need a few, but all the rest 
had been pitched in a heap on the floor. We let him sleep for 
half a day, until we had sorted out all the specimens from the heaps 
of broken glass which half filled a cart, then we tackled him. 
We thought we were going to have quite an exciting time, but we 
were woefully disappointed, for the Python was as drunk as a 
medieval fiddler. What! a Python drunk? How did he get 
drunk? Why, quite easily. Those bottles he knocked down 
from the shelves were full of methylated spirit, and the con- 
centrated fumes of alcohol in that closed-up room got into 
his blood through absorption from the air breathed by him. 
When he got sober he found himself imprisoned in a wire 
cage, where he was forced to do a year’s solitary confinement. 
Then he escaped, and a newspaper reporter finding it out, 
he reported in the leading daily paper a marrow-freezing 
account of how Pythons swallow people as easily as we dispose 
of oysters. 
