346 COMMON REPTILES OF AN INDIAN GARDEN 



them, that the chance of his being bitten was really 

 very small. 



Poor old snake-wala ! he has been dead for some 

 years now, but as long as he survived he was an 

 invaluable servant in the garden. He was a great 

 character, and had for many years superintended the 

 collection of snakes in the menagerie of the last 

 King of Oudh, at Garden Reach. He was full of 

 varied snake-lore, and very free in communicating 

 items of it to a select circle of friends, in which, I 

 am proud to say, I was included. He was great on 

 the subject of the numbers of natives who die from 

 pure nervous depression after bites from harmless 

 snakes, or even from purely imaginary bites. Accord- 

 ing to him, the proper treatment in such cases is 

 to put a drop of croton oil into the patient's eye ; 

 a heroic measure certainly, but one well adapted to 

 divert attention from an imaginary to a real evil. 

 In evidence of the efficacy of this cure, he used to 

 cite a case in which a coolie, whilst walking across 

 a courtyard at the ^small-arms factory at Dum Dum 

 after dark, trod on one end of a piece of an iron- 

 hoop, with the result of bringing the other and 

 jagged extremity sharply up and into contact with 

 the back of his leg. Not unnaturally, the man took 

 for granted that he had been bitten by a snake, and 

 probably by a venomous one. He accordingly made 

 up his mind to die, and, according to the tale, would 

 rapidly have succeeded in doing so, had not our old 



