hey were harmless as kittens, and tried to persuade ourselves that
their little bright eyes were pretty, and that their serpentine
movements were in the exact line of beauty; for the life of us, we could
not help remembering their family name and connections; we thought of
those disagreeable gentlemen, the anacondas, the rattlesnakes, and the
copperheads, and all of that bad line, immediate family friends of the
old serpent to whom we are indebted for all the mischief that is done in
this world. So we were quite apprehensive when we saw how our new
neighborhood was infested by them, until a neighbor calmed our fears by
telling us that snakes always crawled out of their holes to sun
themselves in the spring, and that in a day or two they would all be
gone.

So it proved. It was evident they were all out merely to do their spring
shopping, or something that serves with them the same purpose that
spring shopping does with us; and where they went afterwards we do not
know. People speak of snakes' holes, and we have seen them disappearing
into such subterranean chambers; but we never opened one to see what
sort of underground housekeeping went on there. After the first few days
of spring, a snake was a rare visitor, though now and then one appeared.

One was discovered taking his noontide repast one day in a manner which
excited much prejudice. He was, in fact, regaling himself by sucking
down into his maw a small frog, which he had begun to swallow at the
toes, and had drawn about half down. The frog, it must be confessed,
seemed to view this arrangement with great indifference, making no
struggle, and sitting solemnly, with his great, unwinking eyes, to be
sucked in at the leisure of his captor. There was immense sympathy,
however, excited for him in the family circle; and it was voted that a
snake which indulged in such very disagreeable modes of eating his
dinner was not to be tolerated in our vicinity. So I have reason to
believe that that was his last meal.

Another of our wild woodland neighbors made us some trouble. It was no
other than a veritable woodchuck, whose hole we had often wondered at
when we were scrambling through the underbrush after spring flowers. The
hole was about the size of a peck-measure, and had two openings about
six feet apart. The occupant was a gentleman we never had had the
pleasure of seeing; but we soon learned his existence from his ravages
in our garden. He had a taste, it appears, for