252 THE SNAKES OF SOUTH AFRICA. 
put its three hundred odd ribs and scales in motion to effect its 
escape, he has secured it. If it should succeed in getting into 
the bush, he follows without a second’s delay, plunging headlong 
in its wake. The very impetuosity of his onslaught is a safeguard, 
for the snake is usually too bewildered or terrified to think of 
turning upon him to bite. Swinging his captive round and 
round by the tail, he opens the mouth of his bag and drops 
the dizzy reptile therein. Picking up his stick he resumes his 
quest. 
Spying a Puff Adder or Cobra vanishing into the thick tangled 
scrub, he springs forward, grabs its tail, and carefully pulling it 
out gives it a few swings round his body at arm’s length, and then 
bags it. Puff Adders he has a great contempt for. He lays hold 
of the tail, and without any preliminary swinging drops the reptile 
into his bag. All the snakes captured during the day’s excursion 
are consigned to the same receptacle. 
The next morning he brings them along to me. “ Well, 
Williams, any luck yesterday ?”’ “‘ Yes, I got a few.’’ Opening 
the mouth of the bag, and drawing out a Puff Adder by the tail, 
or with his finger round its throat, and his thumb pressing its 
neck just behind the head, he holds it up for inspection, observing, 
“Tt’s a beauty, isn’t it?” He heeds not my warnings. I 
continually assure him he will die a miserable death from snake 
bite one day, away out upon the lonely bush-veld; but he merely 
smiles and says that he has got to die some day anyway, so as 
well from the bite of a snake as sickness or old age. 
Whenever Indian snake charmers visit Port Elizabeth, 
Williams amuses himself by stepping out from the assembled 
crowd of onlookers, picks up and examines the dentition of the 
snakes which the Indian has been charming, and which he has 
assured the people are highly venomous. Finding the snakes to 
be of the harmless species, or the fangs removed, he thrusts his 
finger into the mouths of two or three. 
Indian snake charmers in Port Elizabeth have a bad time when 
Williams is about, for, somehow, coins do not flow in so readily 
from the onlookers when they find out the snakes are, after all, 
quite harmless. 
On evening during a lecture on snakes to farmers, who firmly 
believed that every snake was venomous, Williams handled a large 
number of non-venomous Mole Snakes and House Snakes. At 
