Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/280

268 snakes meeting together in a kind of congress which was supposed to take place on Midsummer Eve or May Eve. From the general hissing at this meeting of snakes, amicably interlocked, or, in a Welsh version, engaged in a desperate struggle, a kind of bubble of frothy slime was formed which hardened into stone.

The objects which passed for snake stones of this kind seem for the most part to have been fossil sea-urchins, pieces of coral or most frequently of all the glass beads found in barrows of an earlier age. These latter, it may be noticed, were often doubly snake stones, for the lines with which they are sometimes marked suggested a snake imprisoned in the stone. Similarly, in