AMONG THE NUTS. 113 
the mouse is a nibbler, and he preferred to nibble, nibble, 
nibble. Hard by one afternoon, as the cows were 
lazily swishing their tails coming home to milking, and 
the shadow of the thick hedge had already caused the 
anemones in the grass to close their petals, there was a 
slight rustling sound. Out into the cool grass by some 
cowslips there came a small dark head. It was an 
adder, verily a snake in the grass and flowers. His quick 
cye—you know the proverb, ‘If his ear were as quick 
as his eye, No man should pass him by ’—caught sight 
of us immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was 
hollow there, and the mound grown over with close- 
laid, narrow-leaved ivy. The viper did not sink in these 
leaves, but slid with a rustling sound fully exposed above 
them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond 
spots down his back, his flat head with deadly tooth, did 
not harmonise as the green snake does with leaf and 
grass. He was too marked, too prominent—a venomous 
foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or 
native to our wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had 
escaped from the glass case of some collection. 
The green snake or grass snake, with yellow-marked 
head, fits in perfectly with the floating herbage of the 
watery places he frequents. The eye soon grows accus- 
tomed to his curves, till he is no more startling than a 
frog among the water-crowfoot you are about to gather. 
To the adder the mind never becomes habituated ; he 
cver remains repellent. This adder was close to a house 
and cowshed, and, indeed, they seem to like to be near 
cows. Since then a large silvery slowworm was killed 
just there—a great pity, for they are perfectly harmless. 
We saw, too, a very large lizard under the heath. Three 
little effets (efts) ran into one hole on the bank yester- 
day. - Some of the men in spring went off into the woods 
I 
