222 
VISITS TO MADAGASCAR. 
CHAP. VIII. 
of his African poems; but this was the first time I had ob¬ 
tained any honey during my journey. The natives sometimes 
manifest great shrewdness in discovering the haunts of the 
bees. One of them, going to a fountain, saw some grains of 
pollen on the grass, and said, “ A bee has been here to drink, 
and there must be honey in the neighbourhood: ” this he 
ultimately discovered to be the case. Towards evening, we 
passed Bodewall, where Pringle and his party were so hospit¬ 
ably entertained on the way to their location, and soon after 
reached Olive Grove, the residence of Mr. James Hart, 
where we halted for the night. 
His dwelling lies in a sort of wooded hollow at the base of 
the Bosch mountains, a neighbourhood said to be much in¬ 
fested with reptiles and ferocious animals, and on my return 
rather late from a botanising excursion in a lonely dell, we 
heard many accounts of the injuries they had inflicted. The 
day before our arrival, a Cobra de capella had sprung at a 
man who was cutting poles in a glen not far from the house, 
and a short time before two Caffre children were sitting on 
the ground outside their hut, when a snake came out of a 
hole and bit one of them, who died in less than three hours. 
When bitten by a venomous snake, the natives seek a person 
called a poison-sucker, generally a bushman, as these people 
suck the wound with impunity. If no poison-sucker is at 
hand, they cut open a live fowl at the breast, and press the 
cut surface against the wounded part, when the fowl soon dies; 
another is then applied; and the process is thus continued, 
until no effect is produced on the fowl. This neighbourhood 
was also the resort of great numbers of jackals and wolves; 
the latter were very destructive to foals, and had been known 
to attack a horse. Our host had adopted the plan of ridding 
himself of these enemies by poison. He told us that about 
two years before he had got some nux vomica and other 
poisons, mixed them with tallow, and inclosed small lumps of 
