Seen and Lost. aay. 
dead, and red as rust, and filling the hot blue sky 
with silvery down—it was with a very strange 
feeling. The change from the green and living to 
the dead and dry and dusty was so great! There 
seemed to be something mysterious, extra-natural, 
in that low-level plain, so green and fresh ‘and 
snaky, where my horse’s hoofs had made no sound 
—a place where no man dwelt, and no cattle 
pastured, and no wild bird folded its wing. And 
the serpents there were not like others—the 
mechanical coiled-up thing we know, a mere bone- 
and-muscle man-trap, set by the elements, to spring 
and strike when trodden on: but these had a high 
intelligence, a lofty spirit, and were filled with a 
noble rage and astonishment that any other kind of 
creature, even a man, should venture there to disturb 
their sacred peace. It was a fancy, born of that 
sense of mystery which the unknown and _ the 
unusual in nature wakes in us—an obsolescent 
feeling that still links us to the savage. But the 
simple fact was wonderful enough, and that has 
been set down simply and apart from all fancies. 
If the reader happens not to be a naturalist, it is 
right to tell him that a naturalist cannot exaggerate 
consciously; and if he be capable of unconscious 
exaggeration, then he is no naturalist. He should 
hasten “to join the innumerable caravan that 
moves ” to the fantastic realms of romance. Look- 
ing at the simple fact scientifically, it was a case of 
mimicry—the harmless snake mimicking the fierce 
threatening gestures and actions proper to some 
deadly kind. Only with this difference: the 
venomous snake, of all deadly things in nature, is 
