I 
SNAKES 
15 
watched them fluttering round as if powerless to fly 
away, 
I had the pleasurable excitement here of being 
introduced to the nettle tree, some branches of which 
I picked, not knowing what it was. My hand and 
arm ached for many a day afterwards. 
It is a charming house to stay in. I am allowed 
to do just as I like. If I am very busy I don’t come 
in to lunch, no one wonders, and I go quietly on paint- 
ing until five-o’clock tea, when I generally finish the 
whole of the chocolate or cocoa-nut cakes that we always 
have. I take plenty of milk, and am beginning to get 
quite a sleek and well-conditioned look ; it is as yet 
neither too hot nor too cold, though we have fires in 
the early morning and sometimes at night. No one, 
however, goes near them, and they only serve to remind 
us that it is not yet the spring. We drive a good deal, 
and sometimes ride, and the days seem to fly, but the 
snakes really are bad here. I saw a very large and 
deadly brown one coiled up in the fork of a tree under 
which I was painting, a few feet only from the ground. 
I went home as fast as I could and told Mr. R. to bring 
his gun and shoot it, but when we returned to the 
place where I had seen it, it was gone, and only a tiny 
grey lizard was walking up the tree. I never heard the 
end of that, and it remained a joke against me until I 
left. I never longed for anything more at Mackay than 
that the snake would come again. I watched one another 
day on the rocks below me. It went under a stone 
and Mr. R. went to turn it over, when two came from 
underneath, and how quickly we all made off ! Though 
we see them so constantly there is very little fear, for 
they are much more afraid of human beings than we 
are of them, and get away as quickly as they can. 
We are not quite in the wilds here, and the other 
