he foot, hand, or missile of irritated man; while
on the other hand, when a sensitive specimen of the gentler sex (my
grandmother, for example) was attentively holding the door open for her,
she would stiffen and elongate her whole body, and, regardless of all
exhibitions of kindly impatience, proceed out of the drawing-room as
slowly as a funeral _cortege_ of crocodiles.

A good-looking Persian cat is an ornamental piece of furniture in a
house; but though fond of animals, I never succeeded in getting up an
affection for Stoffles until the occurrence of the incident here to be
related. Even in this, however, I cannot conceal from myself that the
share which she took was taken, as usual, solely for her own
satisfaction.

We lived, you know, in a comfortable old-fashioned house facing the
highroad, on the slope of a green hill from which one looked across the
gleaming estuary (or the broad mud-flats) of Southampton Water on to the
rich, rolling woodland of the New Forest. I say we, but in fact for some
months I had been alone, and my husband had just returned from one of
his sporting and scientific expeditions in South America. He had already
won fame as a naturalist, and had succeeded in bringing home alive quite
a variety of beasts, usually of the reptile order, whose extreme rarity
seemed to me a merciful provision of Nature.

But all his previous triumphs were completely eclipsed, I soon learned,
by the capture, alive, on this last expedition, of an abominably
poisonous snake, known to those who knew it as the Blue Dryad, or more
familiarly in backwoods slang, as the Half-hour Striker, in vague
reference to its malignant and fatal qualities. The time in which a
snake-bite takes effect is, by the way, no very exact test of its
virulence, the health and condition not only of the victim, but of the
snake, having of course to be taken into account.

But the Blue Dryad, sometimes erroneously described as a variety of
rattlesnake, is, I understand, supposed to kill the average man, under
favourable circumstances, in less time even than the deadly
Copperhead--which it somewhat resembles, except that it is larger in
size, and bears a peculiar streak of faint peacock-blue down the back,
only perceptible in a strong light. This precious reptile was destined
for the Zoological Gardens.

Being in extremely delicate health at the time, I need hardly say that I
knew nothing of these gruesome details until afterwards. Henry (t