A CURE FOR RATTLESNAKE BITES. 



303 



-» 

 IS 



The family doctor, a gentleman of skill and 

 great experience, watched the case with solicitude, 

 and thought that ultimately the one nature would 

 overcome the other, trusting that, as the life of a 

 rattlesnake did not generally exceed twenty years, 

 the reptile disposition would succumb to the human. 

 When Elsie Venner was about cor ing of age she 

 was taken alarmingly ill, and her recovery despaired 

 of. Some friends and schoolfellows, to lessen the irk- 

 someness of her confinement, sent the invalid a basket 

 of beautiful wild flowers, in which were some leaves 

 and sprigs of white ash, which, when she saw, pro- 

 duced a paroxysm, from which she never recovered. 



When a mere boy — lii-tle over fifteen — I wandered 

 throughout the United States and Canada for nearly 

 three years. While following this erratic life, I 

 reached Coomer Settlement, in Niagara Co., State 

 of New York, and, during my stay there, I heard 

 the above story told, not in the charming chaste 

 language of Oliver Wendell Holmes, but in suffi- 

 ciently plain and graphic diction to firmly impress 

 it upon my memory. The explanation about the 

 white ash — not black ash, which is a swamp-loving 

 tree — is that its bark's juice is a certain specific for 

 the bite of a rattlesnake, and the plant's presence 

 detestable to the reptile, so much so that if either 

 the hunter or wanderer be benighted, and so have 

 to camp out, a circle of white ash bark placed round 

 his resting-place, is a certain preventative of his 

 slumbers being disturbed by the intrusion of this 

 unwelcome visitor. The residents of Coomer Settle- 

 ment were either the original squatters or their 

 descendants, so were invariably great backwoods- 

 men, and they thoroughly believed in white ash 

 bark being a cure when bitten, by external applica- 

 tion in poultice form ; and of security being obtained 

 by a few strips of the bark being distributed around 

 their forest couch. 



