WHAT THE PYTHON DID. 77 



food, as it would otherwise have done every time. The snake 

 was then placed out in the warm sunshine for half a day, the 

 Hgature was removed, and it was then put back into its cage 

 again until next feeding time. 



Crockery-Smashing Python. 



When out hunting one day in Natal we captured a Python, 

 about seventeen or eighteen feet long. My Dutch friend brought 

 it in next day to me in a mealie sack. He dumped it down in 

 my chemical room at the Museum, the walls of which were covered 

 with shelves on which hundreds of jars of specimens in spirits, 

 and lots of empty glass jars, were stored. We could not get a 

 cage ready that day for the Python, so, thinking he would be 

 safe in the sack till the following day, I locked him up and went 

 home. 



What THE Python did. 



You want to know what the Python did ? Why, he somehow 

 or other got out of the sack during the night, and explored every 

 inch of each shelf in the room, seeking some hole through which 

 to escape. Finding none, he coiled himself up in a ball on the 

 topmost shelf and went to sleep. He left an odd bottle here and 

 there on the shelves, thinking I might need a few, but all the rest 

 had been pitched in a heap on the floor. We let him sleep for 

 half a day, until we had sorted out all the specimens from the heaps 

 of broken glass which half filled a cart, then we tackled him. 

 We thought we were going to have quite an exciting time, but we 

 were woefully disappointed, for the Python was as drunk as a 

 mediaeval fiddler. What ! a Python drunk ? How did he get 

 drunk ? Why, quite easily. Those bottles he knocked down 

 from the shelves were full of 70 per cent, strength alcohol, and the 

 concentrated fumes of the spirit in that closed-up room got into 

 his blood through absorption from the air breathed by him. 

 When he got sober he found himself imprisoned in a wire 

 cage, where he was forced to do a year's solitary confinement. 

 Then he escaped, and a newspaper reporter finding it out, 

 he reported in the leading daily paper a marrow-freezing 

 account of how Pythons swallow people as easily as we dispose 

 of oysters. 



