SNAKE YARNS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2879, 19 May 1909, Page 80

SNAKE YARNS.

There to be no limit to what we are a*ked to believe about the snake. (Some time ago an inquest "was held on a boy who was said to have died of fright on seeing a snake by his side. A neighbour volunteered her evidence, and dilated oji the manner in which she fed the angry reptile with bread to keep it quiet until help arrived. It turned out to be a two-foot grass .snake, with, of course, no poisonous fangs at all. Perhaps the mala gramma with which it stored its .strength after a winter's rest had something to do with it. Did Longfellow ever see with his mortal eyes the Kenabeek he so graphically describes in "Hiawatha"? Everyone ftays snakes are slimy, and Byron goes as far as to write of the black slime which betrays her as she crawls; and Shakespeal c tells of the slime on the fig leaves in tiie aspic's trail. Almost anything i.- believed of the snake's supposed power oi fascination. And then there is the i.ile that snakes lick their victims all over so that they may slip down the easier. It would be ide labour, for the saliva on a snake'.s tonr-ue wo;i!d hardly cover a halfpenny. And how was it the adder came to bo deaf? How is it the blindwonn i* not bl.ryl. and that its other name, tho .-'ov, norm, is equa'ly inappropriate? 'Jo Mi 1 ('ib«o.n. who wrote a volume som? yeai.-* bru k on superstition > about animals, wo nv.t tvio delightful In - •bailees of t!ie poi ,<,nous character of .i make's venom. A lattlesnake. finding it could not bite '. lie leg of an American farmer, who had, a.-- im the Virginian simile, almost trodden on him unawares. seized his rake raid bit it. In a moment the rake swelled to a monstrous size. And he quotes from John Wesley's "Survey of the Wonders of God in Creation : " >[ A ;nan provoking one of them to bits the edge of his broad axe. the colour of tb© stoel part presently changed." This is bad enough.' but moui if to come. "At the fiist stroke h»> made with the axe at his work the discoloured part broke out, leaving a gap in tiie axe." The ancients told of a ti!b» on the shora? of th° Gulf oi Sidra, the odoiU" ol who^e bodies oveicame wit>, •orpor such serpent; a.", they met. This

afforded them an easy test of the fidelity of their •« ives ; for they exposed their new born bsbes to the fiercest serpents. Among the ancients we find but little in the way of stories of snakes that breathes anything but natural antipathy.