26 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
flat head and pressing it with my thumb, I pulled 
the body straight and succeeded in getting the 
exact length. It was twenty-eight inches. The 
biggest adder I had hitherto found was twenty-five 
and a half; this was in the New Forest, in the 
wildest part, where it is most thinly inhabited and 
adders are most abundant. None of the other 
biggest adders I had measured before and since 
exceeded twenty-four inches. 
We see that the adder, when we come to measure 
it, is not a big snake; it looks bigger than it is, 
partly on account of its strange conspicuous colour- 
ing, with the zigzag shape of the band, and its 
reputation as a dangerous serpent; this makes an 
adder two feet long look actually bigger than the 
grass-snake of three feet—the size to which this 
snake usually grows. 
In a minute or two my adder recovered from the 
effects of the tap on his head and was permitted to 
glide away into the furze bushes. And leaving the 
spot I went on, but had not gone forty yards 
before catching sight of another adder lying coiled 
up. I stopped to look at it, then slowly advanced 
to within about five feet of it, and there remained 
standing still, just to see whether or not my presence 
so close to it would affect it in any way. Presently, 
hearing a shout, I looked up and saw two horsemen 
coming up over the down in front of me. They 
pulled up and sat staring down at me—a big man 
on a big horse, and a rather small man on a small 
horse. The big man was the shooting tenant, and 
