A SNAKE TO BE REAL PROUD OF.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 9523, 15 July 1899, Page 6 (Supplement)

A SNAKE TO BE REAL PROUD OF.

' The most wonderful den of snakes anywhere. I guess,' says Judge B. Jugg Wright in the Chicago Inter Ocean, ' lies off the south of old Steuben, in a big stretch of deep, dark woods in Potter County, Pennsylvania, known as the Black forest. It is a black snake den. A year never goes by that ono or two immense black snakes are not overpowered by superior numbers of lumber men, or bark peelers over there, as they are always prowling about looking for unwary teamsters and unsuspecting persons afoot. I don't suppose there is another spot on this continent where such monstrous black snakes can be found.

' There is no doubt in my mind that some of those Black forest serpents were born long before this country was settled. I have seen them with their faces as wrinkled as a walnut and with long, gray hair on their upper lips. My brother-in-law, 'Squire Ilollis of Woodhull, tells about one he killed down there once that had a funnylooking lump on its side. He cut down into the lump six inches or so and found a flint arrow head there. The snake had been shot by an Indian some time. As there hadn't been any Indians hunting with bows and arrows in that country for about three generations, of course the snake must have been a lively native before the days of the white man thereabout, and nobody

knows how many years before that, cither.

•I say 'Squire Hollis killed that snake, but that is hardly a correct statement. He was lumbering over in that region and had a lot of logs banked for rolling down a steep slope into the creek. Accidentally a log got loose and away it went down hill. It had gone maybe half way down and had taken on enormous momentum when this snake came tearing out from some place where it had been biding and rushed straight out in the path of that flying log. There is no telling what the snake thought the log was, but he was evidently in a state of supreme fury at it, for he stopped and raised his head up and waited the coming of the log. The log kept straight on and struck the snake with all the force it had accumulated. The crash was terrific, and the log stopped as if it had been brought up against a rock. The 'squire went down the hill and found the log canted up against the snake, and he declares yet that if he hadn't seen the collision he wouldn't have known which was the snake and which was the log, they were so near of a size. The snake was dead from the shock, though, and 'Squire Hollis has never ceased to regret his foolishness in rolling it into the creek after he had cut the lump and found the arrowhead, and letting it float away without measuring it, because he never could tell how long the serpent was. The 'squire says, though, that if the snake could have been seasonedand sawed up it would have cut into as nice a pile of sixteen-foot boards a foot and a half wide as any one ever bought. That snake, of course, was an exception to the ordinary run of Black forest snakes, and from what the 'squire says, there isn't any doubt at all in my mind that it was the founder of the black snake family in that country. There weren't a gray hair on him, though, and his teeth were as sound as a pebble.'