Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/496

Rh the beaten ways of the swamp must be prepared to meet these inhabitants.

For three days, with a cool wind and nightly rain, with the exception of one large king-snake which we killed on a "gum road," we had seen nothing more noxious than a blue lizard with a red head, a harmless and friendly little fellow who seems to have no fear of man, for he will go on eating his invisible food and glancing up in your face in a most amusing and taking way. But the shape of the creature is against it, and the color of his head, which is exactly the hue of the moccasin's belly. When Moseley woke up from a doze one wet afternoon, and found one of these lizards (the negroes call them scorpions) on his pillow, still eating invisible food and smacking his lips with a friendly glance, it was well the reptile didn't understand American, or he might have been offended.

Our first snake was killed in this way: On our second day, while passing up a "gum road," we came upon a large dark-skinned snake lazily coiled on a sunny log. Having killed him by striking him with a heavy cane, we were afterward told by Abeham that it was a harmless king-snake, and that, moreover, it spent its time destroying the poisonous snakes in the swamp, which it does by crushing them.