The sight of it was always startling, and however
often seen always produced a mixed sense of amazement and fear. The
feeling was no doubt acquired from our elders. They regarded snakes as
deadly creatures, and as a child I did not know that they were mostly
harmless, that it was just as senseless to kill them as to kill
harmless and beautiful birds. I was told that when I saw a snake I
must turn and run for my life until I was a little bigger, and then on
seeing a snake I was to get a long stick and kill it; and it was
furthermore impressed on me that snakes are exceedingly difficult to
kill, that many persons believe that a snake never really dies until
the sun sets, therefore when I killed a snake, in order to make it
powerless to do any harm between the time of killing it and sunset, it
was necessary to pound it to a pulp with the aforesaid long stick.
With such teaching it was not strange that even as a small boy I
became a persecutor of snakes.
Snakes were common enough about us; snakes of seven or eight different
kinds, green in the green grass, and yellow and dusky-mottled in dry
and barren places and in withered herbage, so that it was difficult to
detect them. Sometimes they intruded into the dwelling-rooms, and at
all seasons a nest or colony of snakes existed in the thick old
foundations of the house, and under the flooring.
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