AMONG THE NUTS. 113 



the mouse is a nibbler, and he preferred to nibble, nibble, 

 nibble. Hard by one afternoon, as the cows were 

 ilazily swishing their tails coming home to milking, and 

 Ithe shadow of the thick hedge had already caused the 

 jancmones in the grass to close their petals, there was a 

 slight rustling sound. Out into the cool grass by some 

 cowslips there came a small dark head. It was an 

 ladder, verily a snake in the grass and flowers. His quick 

 eye — you know the proverb, ' If his ear were as quick 

 as his eye, No man should pass him by ' — caught sight 

 of us immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was 

 I hollow there, and the mound grown over with close- 

 llaid, narrow-leaved ivy. The viper did not sink in these 

 leaves, but slid with a rustling sound fully exposed above 

 them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond 

 spots down his back, his flat head with deadly tooth, did 

 not harmonise as the green snake does with leaf and 

 grass. He was too marked, too prominent — a venomous 

 foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or 

 inative to our wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had 

 'escaped from the glass case of some collection. 



The green snake or grass snake, with yellow-marked 

 head, fits in perfectly with the floating herbage of the 

 .watery places he frequents. The eye soon grows accus- 

 tomed to his curves, till he is no more startling than a 

 frog among the water-crowfoot you are about to gather. 

 To the adder the mind never becomes habituated ; he 

 ;ever remains repellent. This adder was close to a house 

 and cowshed, and, indeed, they seem to like to be near 

 cows. Since then a large silvery slowworm was killed 

 just there — a great pity, for they are perfectly harmless. 

 We saw, too, a very large lizard under the heath. Three 

 little effets (efts) ran into one hole on the bank yester- 

 day. Some of the men in spring went off into the woods 



I 



