arried earth, and which held nothing. But it was no use; they laughed
at the wheel-barrows, and said "Eh yaw!" but went on with the baskets.

Every evening we used to walk up the hill to see how the building was
getting on, all the children with us; then, as we sat on the timber, I
used to draw the letters of the alphabet on the white sand, and the
little ones learnt them. We went home through a piece of ground we
called our garden. In it grew plenty of pine-apples and sugar-cane, and
the gardener always supplied us with pieces of the latter to eat--very
refreshing and nice, but the juice ran all over your hands. As for
pine-apples, we soon got tired of them; but they made good tarts, and,
mixed with plantains and lime-juice, a very pleasant and useful jam.

In clearing the hill our workmen disturbed the haunts of many snakes. We
were a good deal visited by cobras for some years. The natives said that
the Adam and Eve of all the cobras lived in a cave under our hill.

One day we were having asphalte laid down in the printing-room, to keep
away white ants. The room had been emptied to do this, and Stahl went in
to inspect the work after the men had gone to their breakfast at eleven
o'clock. He saw a large cobra at the end of the room, and hit it with a
stick he had in his hand; but the stick broke in two, and the cobra
reared itself up with inflated hood. Another minute must have seen Stahl
a prey to the monster; but the Bishop, passing by, heard him exclaim
when the stick broke, and going quickly in saw Stahl standing, white,
fascinated, and motionless, before the cobra. Happily he had a stout
walking-stick, and at once felled the reptile; but he took a good deal
of killing. It was ten feet long.

This was Adam.

Eve was killed under the verandah of the house almost a year afterwards.
She was eight feet long.

One night the Bishop had been reading the Rev. F. Robertson's sermon
about St. Paul and the viper. It was late, and being rather sleepy he
carried the book in one hand and a candle in the other into his
dressing-room, and was just going to set the candle down, when his eye
fell on a cobra, coiled up on the chair on which he was about to seat
himself. No stick was at hand, but he smote the snake with the book.
Struck in the right place, they are not difficult to kill. So "St. Paul
and the Viper" put an end to the cobra. That the bite of this snake is
not, however, certain death we had a curious instance.

On