324 AMERICAN SNAKES. 



its native haunts, as I have, must acknowledge that its 

 gaze is painful to encounter, and that even the mental 

 powers of man are apt to grow benumbed when that 

 eye, so full of command and yet so mysterious in its 

 gaze, meets the human vision. 



Let no hunter stop to gaze upon the fearful crotalas, 

 or he will experience a strange subtle charm which it 

 will require a most resolute effort to break through. 

 His blood will start back from his heart ; he will feel 

 as conscious of the presence of real and imminent 

 danger as though he stood upon the brink of some 

 fearful precipice. The spiral convulsions of the snake 

 will find a response in the whirlings of his own fevered 

 brain ; the forked tongue will play before his gaze with 

 increasing rapidity till it seems like a flash of lightning ; 

 the continual hum of the rattles will be like a droning 

 music soothing his senses, and its mysterious eyes will 

 glare as openly and terribly as the portals of Dante's 

 Inferno, Let him not stop to look upon the death- 

 dealing object; but wdth well-directed shot sever its 

 head from its body, or w^ith clubbed gun pound that 

 horrid head to jelly. 



Nor is this caution needless. There are men who 

 have experienced this strange fascination. A gentle- 

 man living in Philadelphia was riding on horseback to 

 visit a friend, when his horse refused to go forward, 

 being alarmed at the presence of a huge rattlesnake 

 that lay right in his path. The gentleman, who had 



