296 A Sportswoman in India 



mark of the bite, binding the limb with very great 

 pressure. The poison began to tell in a few moments. 

 The pony reeled about, breathing heavily, and evi- 

 dently suffering greatly. In a quarter of an hour 

 it fell down, and lay on the ground struggling so 

 pitiably that an end was put, with a gun, to such a 

 painful scene. The snake had struck a large vein. 



One more sad experience and I have done. My 

 brother-in-law, at Derajat, had a grass-cutter named 

 Jahm, a healthy young man, twenty-two years old. 

 One morning he was taking his pipe out of a hole 

 in the stable wall, and as he reached in his hand, felt 

 a sudden, sharp bite a snake had darted at his middle 

 finger. My brother-in-law was fetched, and saw 

 him ten minutes after it happened, by which time 

 the servants had already put a ligature tightly round 

 the finger. The mark of the bite was so slight as 

 to be almost hard to see two little punctures alone 

 were visible ; and there was hardly any pain in the 

 finger. 



The man himself had only caught sight of the end 

 of the snake, and unfortunately it had darted back 

 into the wall, with no hopes of being able to find 

 it again and kill it. Judging from the absence of 

 pain, my brother-in-law concluded that it was a non- 

 venomous snake ; but Jahm himself, from the glimpse 

 he caught of it, thought it was a bis-cobra. If this 

 were the case, his days were numbered. My brother- 

 in-law put on a second ligature at once, higher up, 

 round the man's arm ; and still the only pain he felt 



