before in the history of the Zoo was the reptile house so
crowded. Day after day people thronged to see the specimen of _Coronella
laevis_ found on the path in Regent's Park. Not one looked at the two
splendid specimens of the largest and finest and fiercest snakes bought
that very week by the Zoological Society, at a cost of three hundred
pounds. My snake was valued at anything between sixpence and
eighteenpence, but it brought more money to the turnstiles of the Zoo
than all the other snakes put together in twenty years.

From an address not half-a-mile from the gates of the Zoological Gardens
a gentleman wrote to the _World_ about a snake he found in his garden. A
London and North-Western guard found a boa-constrictor, 22 feet long, in
his van! "The son of a well-known Member of Parliament" found a huge
snake in one of the rooms of his father's London house. In fact,
snake-finding became an epidemic, and if I had come across any more of
the ophidian brood, I would have feared the consequences. Alas! the
British public killed my snake--as it has killed many another celebrity
of the hour--by too much attention and flattery. But how the cause of
all this excitement got on to the path in the centre of Regent's Park
remains a mystery. I feel certain myself it had escaped from the
Zoological Gardens through the drains, and the fact that others were
discovered in the vicinity of the Park at the same time explains the
confusion and mild chaff accepted by the _Westminster_ interviewer as a
complete explanation, forgetting that officialism when criticised is
much the same all the world over.

[Illustration: THE LADY AND HER SNAKES.]

"The Harrow School Boy" correspondent--probably a very old boy--is not
alone in his strange choice of pets. A lady who had sent her pet snakes
to the Zoological Gardens--not by "The Roving Rook Post," but by the
usual course of presentation--happened to visit the Gardens at the time
that other great attraction was drawing all London, the great Jumbo
craze. When she arrived to see the elephant of the hour, the crowd was
so dense around his cage that there was no chance of getting a peep, so
she marched off to the reptile house and soon returned with one of her
pets coiled round her neck. She took her stand close to the people
engaged in struggling to pat the trunk of the Jumbo, feed it with the
most expensive sweetmeats, decorate it with choice flowers, and weep
bitter tears over its impending de