them often chilled our childish hearts. Once Harriet and I,
with little Frank in his cart, came suddenly upon a monster diamond-back
rattler sleeping by the roadside. In our mad efforts to escape, the cart
was overturned and the baby scattered in the dust almost within reach of
the snake. As soon as she realized what had happened, Harriet ran back
bravely, caught up the child and brought him safely away.

Another day, as I was riding on the load of wheat-sheaves, one of the
men, in pitching the grain to the wagon lifted a rattlesnake with his
fork. I saw it writhing in the bottom of the sheaf, and screamed out, "A
snake, a snake!" It fell across the man's arm but slid harmlessly to the
ground, and he put a tine through it.

As it chanced to be just dinner time he took it with him to the house
and fastened it down near the door of a coop in which an old hen and her
brood of chickens were confined. I don't know why he did this but it
threw the mother hen into such paroxysms of fear that she dashed herself
again and again upon the slats of her house. It appeared that she
comprehended to the full the terrible power of the writhing monster.

Perhaps it was this same year that one of the men discovered another
enormous yellow-back in the barnyard, one of the largest ever seen on
the farm--and killed it just as it was moving across an old barrel. I
cannot now understand why it tried to cross the barrel, but I distinctly
visualize the brown and yellow band it made as it lay for an instant
just before the bludgeon fell upon it, crushing it and the barrel
together. He was thicker than my leg and glistened in the sun with
sinister splendor. As he hung limp over the fence, a warning to his
fellows, it was hard for me to realize that death still lay in his
square jaws and poisonous fangs.

Innumerable garter-snakes infested the marsh, and black snakes inhabited
the edges of the woodlands, but we were not so much afraid of them. We
accepted them as unavoidable companions in the wild. They would run from
us. Bears and wildcats we held in real terror, though they were
considered denizens of the darkness and hence not likely to be met with
if one kept to the daylight.

The "hoop snake" was quite as authentic to us as the blue racer,
although no one had actually seen one. Den Green's cousin's uncle had
killed one in Michigan, and a man over the ridge had once been stung by
one that came rolling down the hill with his tail in his mou