18 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
If he had said 300 I should not have been sur- 
prised. The man on the soil does not often see 
an adder, because for one thnig he does not look 
for it, and still more because of the heavy boots he 
wears, with which he pounds the earth like a dray- 
horse with its ponderous iron-shod hoofs. Even 
men who walk lightly and wear light foot - gear 
make, as a rule, an amazing noise in walking over 
dry heathy places with brittle sticks and dry 
vegetable matter covering the ground. I have had 
persons thrust their. company on me when going 
for a stroll on ground abounding in adders, and 
have known at once from their way of walking in 
an unaccustomed place that the quest would prove 
an idle one. Their lightest, most cautious tread 
would alarm and send into hiding every adder a 
dozen or twenty yards in advance of us. 
In spring the adders are most alert and shyest. 
Later in the season some adders, as a rule the 
females, become sluggish and do not slip quickly 
away when approached; but in summer the 
herbage is apt to hide them, and they lie more in 
the shade than in March, April, and the early part 
of May. In spring you must go alone and softly, 
but you need not fear to whistle and sing, or even 
to shout, for the adder is deaf and cannot hear you; 
on the other hand, his body is sensitive in an 
extraordinary degree to earth vibrations, and the 
ordinary tread of even a very light man will 
disturb him at a distance of fifteen or twenty 
yards. That sense of the adder, which has no 
