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TRELAWNY. 
pressure on his head, which on turning his eyes he 
found to proceed from a huge Boa coiled up on his 
pillow : terror-struck, he neither dared to stir nor to 
cry ; and thus he lay till his domestics, anxious at 
his non-appearance, looked through the window of 
his bedroom ; and discovered the spell. They soon 
rushed in, and killing the dreaded intruder, released 
their master. A serpent of this species was dis- 
covered in my own bedroom one night at Content, as 
I was preparing to retire for rest. Though certainly 
not within the bed, it was but a few inches from my 
pillow ; but the motive of its intrusion, which proved 
fatal to it, and afforded me the original of a drawing 
and description, was probably the pursuit of the rats 
that scampered along the rafters over the bed. A male 
which I dissected in February had a large mass of 
rat’s hair in the stomach and rectum, consolidated by 
pressure like the pellets disgorged by owls. 
Mr. Hill has recently communicated to me an 
anecdote illustrative of this Serpent’s voracity* 
Mr. Kelly of Tophill, Trelawny, showed me a fine 
skin of a Yellow Snake, — that most powerful of our 
ophidians. It measured, as I should guess by the 
eye, nine feet. The Snake was taken in a rat-trap. 
The pen-keeper, suspecting that the depredation 
committed in the fowl-house was the act of a Yellow 
Snake, set a rat-trap to catch him ; and succeeded in 
fixing him by the neck. In his death-struggles he 
had nearly twisted his body from his head. When 
opened, he was found to have gulped down, whole 
and unbroken, seven hen’s eggs. I forgot to inquire 
with what bait he had been enticed to the trap. If it 
was a recently-killed rat it would no doubt attract him ; 
