A YEAR OF SNAKES 337 



inch reptile moving like Juno across the road, its 

 head held high, with large lustrous eyes in front, and 

 gold at the nape. 



The ladies at the farm will not see beauty in any 

 snake, great or small. Yet they have had more oppor- 

 tunities of admiring them this summer than for many 

 years. It is astonishing that in a year of such gloom 

 snakes should seem so abundant. The fact is that 

 the sun has been so remiss that one of the equivalents 

 of sunshine has had to be sought in the yards by 

 warmth-lovers that in other years would have been 

 inconspicuously distributed far over the fields. 

 Ahvays a snake comes in July to lay her eggs in 

 the manure-heap, but she is very furtive about it, 

 and usually goes away in the course of a few days 

 without having been seen. There are in other 

 summers other heaps of mouldering vegetation where 

 wilder snakes can place their eggs with some prospect 

 of their hatching into young snakes. This year, 

 however, every snake in the parish seems to have 

 tried the yard. Some fourteen or fifteen have been 

 killed by boys in the near neighbourhood, and parts 

 of the manure-heap seem to be mines of eggs. On 

 the top of the heap grow pumpkins and vegetable 

 marrows, and when the farmer's wife is courageous 

 enough to go there for a vegetable, she usually sees a 

 snake glide away from the mild sun-bath it had been 

 taking. They did not come to lay and then decamp, 

 but they stayed to take for themselves the same 

 treatment that is good for the eggs. On a sunny 

 day they can get as good a roasting here as anywhere 

 else, and on a dull day they can keep much warmer 

 than in the fields. Frogs are plentiful enough near 

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