104 THE RING OF NATURE 



size of pigeons' eggs. You can dig them up there 

 any year in August and early September, and if 

 you get them late you will have a chance of seeing 

 them hatch into young snakes. A reptile seven 

 inches long comes from the narrow compass of 

 one of these eggs. As soon as it hatches it coils 

 and threatens just like its mother. Its proportions, 

 however, are far more graceful. Its large and 

 brilliant eyes occupy a greater proportion of its 

 face, as all baby eyes should. It has the distinctive 

 yellow crown of its tribe and the black patches 

 that set it off, and one of these slender, faith- 

 fully miniatured snakelings swimming through the 

 dust with its head poised in a manner that any 

 calisthenic teacher must approve is as pretty an 

 object as there is in nature. 



Last year I came to the wood rather early for 

 grass snakes, and it was not till I had hunted long 

 and far that I saw a reptile making off through the 

 hedge bottom. There was no time to speculate, 

 and in an instant I had seized it by the tail. In 

 another second it had dawned upon me that it 

 was not a grass snake, and with a cry of ' viper ' 

 I flung it down. 



The viper comes from its hibernaculum earlier 

 than the grass snake. It is comparatively an 

 Alpine species, occupying all the year round these 

 high dry banks rather than the frogging grounds 

 affected in summer by the grass snake. The dry 

 walls of our Cotswold country are its favourite 

 stronghold, and in spring the vipers are found 



