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282 the world like men.” They exchanged shots, and one bullet taking effect on a neighbor’s boy, as he was scrambling through the hedge, and the other having hit a cow that was looking over the gate, the seconds declared that honor was satisfied. I recommend, therefore, that when the snake has effected the cure, it should not be bottled and buried, but should be put back into some bank or hedgerow to carry on its useful war against snails and slugs and worms.

There are few things a snake has not been found at one time or another to resemble, and there is nothing apparently that a snake is not able to do — except swallow a porcupine. One species, a native of Assam, is in itself an epitome of all the vices; for in its vindictive ferocity it not only stalks its prey and pounces upon it, but chases it swiftly, and tracks it like a bloodhound, relentlessly, drives it up trees, and climbs after it like a squirrel, hunts it into rivers, and dives after it like a seal, gets up on one end to pick it off a perch, or grovels like a mole after it if it tries to escape by tunnelling in the earth. So, at any rate, the Assamese say, and their word is as good as that of the Greeks in the matter of snakes. What awful parallels in the past, again, can be found in Nature adequate to the tales of terror that travellers have had to tell of the python which arrests in full career the wind-footed bison, of the boa-constrictor, that hurls itself from overhanging rocks and trees in coils of dreadful splendor upon even the jaguar and the puma, of the anaconda, the superb dictator of the Brazilian forests! Do the hydras, dragons, or chimæras of antiquity surpass these three in terrors? Nor among the lesser evils of the serpent folk of old, the cockatrices, basilisks, and asps, do we find any to