_.]

[Footnote 5: Trigonocephalus hypnale, _Wegl_.]

_Cobra de Capello_.--The cobra de capello is the only one exhibited by
the itinerant snake-charmers: and the accuracy of Davy's conjecture,
that they control it, not by extracting its fangs, but by courageously
availing themselves of its accustomed timidity and extreme reluctance to
use its fatal weapons, received a painful confirmation during my
residence in Ceylon, by the death of one of these performers, whom his
audience had provoked to attempt some unaccustomed familiarity with the
cobra; it bit him on the wrist, and he expired the same evening. The
hill near Kandy, on which the official residences of the Governor and
Colonial Secretary had been built, is covered in many places with the
deserted nests of the white ants (_termites_), and these are the
favourite retreats of the sluggish and spiritless cobra, which watches
from their apertures the toads and lizards on which it preys. Here, when
I have repeatedly come upon them, their only impulse was concealment;
and on one occasion, when a cobra of considerable length could not
escape sufficiently quickly, owing to the bank being nearly precipitous
on both sides of the road, a few blows from my whip were sufficient to
deprive it of life. There is a rare variety which the natives fancifully
designate the "king of the cobras;" it has the head and the anterior
half of the body of so light a colour, that at a distance it seems like
a silvery white.[1] A gentleman who held a civil appointment at
Kornegalle, had a servant who was bitten by a snake, and he informed me
that on enlarging a hole near the foot of the tree under which the
accident occurred, he unearthed a cobra of upwards of three feet long,
and so purely white as to induce him to believe that it was an albino.
With the exception of the rat-snake[2], the cobra de capello is the only
serpent which seems from choice to frequent the vicinity of human
dwellings, but it is doubtless attracted by the young of the domestic
fowl and by the moisture of the wells and drainage. The Singhalese
remark that if one cobra be destroyed near a house, its companion is
almost certain to be discovered immediately after,--a popular belief
which I had an opportunity of verifying on more than one occasion. Once,
when a snake of this description was killed in a bath of Government
House at Colombo, its mate was found in the same spot the day after; and
again, at my own stables, a cobr