ng him.
Cutting some sharp-pointed stakes, I waited till he was again quiet,
when I suddenly pinned his tail to the ground with my hunting-knife, and
thrusting the pointed stake into the hole, I drove it deeply into the
ground with the butt end of my rifle. The boa made some objection to
this, and again he commenced his former muscular contortions. I waited
till they were over, and having provided myself with some tough jungle
rope (a species of creeper), I once more approached him, and pinning his
throat to the ground with a stake, I tied the rope through the incision,
and the united exertions of myself and three men hauled him out
perfectly straight. I then drove a stake firmly through his throat
and pinned him out. He was fifteen feet in length, and it required our
united strength to tear off his skin, which shone with a variety of
passing colours. On losing his hide he tore away from the stakes; and
although his head was shivered to atoms, and he had lost three feet
of his length of neck by the ball having cut through this part, which
separated in tearing off the skin, still he lashed out and writhed in
frightful convulsions, which continued until I left him, bearing as my
trophy his scaly hide. These boas will kill deer, and by crushing them
into a sort of sausage they are enabled by degrees to swallow them.
There are many of these reptiles in Ceylon; but they are seldom seen,
as they generally wander forth at night. There are marvellous stories
of their size, and my men assured me that they had seen much larger than
the snake now mentioned; to me he appeared a horrible monster.

I do not know anything so disgusting as a snake. There is an instinctive
feeling that the arch enemy is personified when these wretches glide
by you, and the blood chills with horror. I took the dried skin of this
fellow to England; it measures twelve feet in its dry state, minus
the piece that was broken from his neck, making him the length before
mentioned of fifteen feet.

I have often been astonished that comparatively so few accidents happen
in Ceylon from snake-bites; their immense number and the close nature of
the country making it a dangerous risk to the naked feet of the natives.
I was once lying upon a sofa in a rest-house at Kandellai, when I saw
a snake about four feet long glide in at the open door, and, as though
accustomed to a particular spot for his lodging, he at once climbed upon
another sofa and coiled himself under t