Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/507

Rh causes it may have come to pass that an antipathy to snakes was engendered in my heart.

My cousin Frank Buckland, with whom I was for some time at school as a boy, had a fondness for keeping snakes in his pockets, which was not shared by his schoolfellows, including me. However this may have been, I have little recollection of anything about snakes at that time, except that when I was a boy at Eton there was a large snake exhibited one year at Windsor fair, which pleased our juvenile fancy, as we were glad to see a snake as described by Virgil positis novus exuviis, and we were delighted to buy, for a very fancy price, a piece of the old skin that it had shed. The next time that I met a snake the meeting was bad for the snake. A friend was driving me in his buggy in the suburbs of Calcutta with a fast-trotting horse, when a large snake tried to cross the road in front of us. But the horse, not seeing or not heeding it, trotted on, and a wheel of the buggy cut the snake in half. We pulled up to examine the remains, and it turned out to be only a large but harmless water-snake.

It is hardly credible how long a time a man may live in India without seeing snakes in his house, unless he looks about diligently for them. Of course there is more chance of seeing them out of doors, and especially out snipe-shooting, as the snake is an amphibious sort of creature, with a special appetite for a juicy young frog, whose home, not always a very happy one, is in the rice-fields. What with the long-legged birds of the crane species that stalk through the water, and the snakes who glide about in the mud, or lie on the little earthen ridges which divide the rice-fields for irrigation purposes, the frogs have a bad time of it. One afternoon I was walking along one of the earthen ridges between the rice-fields, looking for snipe on either side of me, when a few yards in front of me there reared up three cobras, facing me with hoods erect, and evidently "meaning venom." I fired a charge of snipe-shot into them, and there was a great confusion of heads and tails and bits of bodies, so that it would have been hard to put a whole snake together again. This gave me a useful lesson to keep a good lookout. One day I was out shooting with a friend who trod on a snake, which promptly curled round his leg and tried to bite through his gaiter. His gaiter was perfectly snake-proof, but he did not think of that, and his efforts to shoot the snake without hitting his own leg were so ludicrous that it was hardly possible not to laugh, until we could hit the snake on the head with a loading-rod and make it quit my friend's leg.

Once we were spending a holiday at a little bungalow at the seaside, to which we used to go occasionally for change of air, and sea-bathing if the tide permitted it. We were walking along the sandy beach, when we saw a large cobra, about five feet long, with