NATURAL HISTORY NOTES 
179 
fire, and asked whether the bath was ready. On receiving the 
usual reply * Bar do ’ (in a little while), I told them to hurry up 
or I would give them a snake, and suddenly produced this one 
from behind my back. Instant commotion ensued with the 
overturning of boxes (which served them as seats), and with 
fezs grasped tightly in their fists, two were sprinting off up the 
path, the other two were peeping round the corner of their 
shed, and I walked back to the house. The bath was ready in 
ten minutes. 
August 20. — During the night we had a heavy shower of 
rain, the first for several weeks past. Cycling into Nairobi, 
I came across a procession of ants crossing the road in single 
file, most of them carrying eggs or pupse. In between the 
bearers, after every three or four, was a soldier, for all the world 
like a human safari party of a few years ago crossing the 
plains of British East Africa, when the hostile Masai were a 
power in the land. No doubt the rain had flooded out these 
little people from some ill-chosen site of a nest. 
Returning home at dusk this evening, the same bike and 
side-car passed me as on Wednesday, and in doing so, ran over 
a similar large female brown house-snake a few yards in front 
of me. I did not know the creature had been run over till 
I seized it and got my hands all gory from the blood it was 
passing ; there was no external trace of injury, but as the blood 
evidenced it was badly hurt internally, I chloroformed it 
immediately on getting in. It was very savage on being 
caught, and chewed away at my finger whilst I was endeavour- 
ing to disengage its tail, which it had entwined around my 
spokes. The muscular energy of dead snakes is extraordinary. 
Chloroforming one of this species to death the other day, I laid 
it on the table, and, after making an incision in the throat and 
another near the tail, I drew out the whole of its internal 
organs — lungs, alimentary canal, everything. On my right- 
hand side there lay the viscera with the heart beating man- 
fully away, when suddenly the skin and skeleton — for it was 
nothing more — started to wriggle and twist in the most grue- 
some fashion. I was glad that I was a person of temperate 
habits, otherwise I should have had a bad fright. 
August 21. — Cycled about five miles out to Jolleys’ shamba 
