t
attained, the venom may be thrown to considerable distances, falling
in drops; and Sir Arthur Cunynghame in a recent work on South Africa
relates that he was cautioned not to approach a huge cobra of six feet
or more in length in its death agony, lest it should hurl venom in his
eyes and create blindness; he afterward found that an officer of Her
Majesty's XV. Regiment had been thus injured at a distance of
_forty-five feet_, and did not recover his eyesight for more than a
week.[1]

[Footnote 1: Presumably the Natal ombozi, or spitting cobra, _Naja
haemachites_, who is fully equal to the feat described.]

With the infliction of the stroke and expression of its venom, the
creature usually attempts to reverse its fangs in the wound, thereby
dragging through and lacerating the flesh; an ingenious bit of
devilishness hardly to be expected from so low a form of organism; but
its frequent neglect proves it by no means mechanical, and it
frequently occurs that the animal bitten drags the reptile after it a
short distance, or causes it to leave its fangs in the wound. Some
serpents also, as the fer de lance, black mamba, and water moccasin,
are apparently actuated by most vindictive motives, and coil
themselves about the part bitten, clinging with leech-like tenacity
and resisting all attempts at removal. Two gentlemen of San Antonio,
Texas,[2] who were bitten by rattlesnakes, subsequently asserted that
after having inflicted all possible injury, the reptiles scampered
away with unmistakable manifestations of pleasure. "Snakes," remarked
one of the victims, "usually glide smoothly away with the entire body
prone to the ground; but the fellow I encountered traveled off with an
up and down wave-like motion, as if thrilled with delight, and then,
getting under a large rock where he was safe from pursuit, he turned,
and raising his head aloft waved it to and fro, as if saying. 'Don't
you feel good now?' It would require but a brief stretch of the
imagination to constitute that serpent a veritable descendant of the
old Devil himself."

[Footnote 2: On the authority of N.A. Taylor and H.F. McDaniels.]

As the first blow commonly exhausts the receptacle of the duct, a
second (the venom being more or less mingled and diluted by the
salivary secretion) is comparatively less fatal in results; and each
successive repetition correspondingly inoffensive until finally
nothing but pure mucus is ejected. Nevertheless, when thorou