aspedocephalus, coiled on a stone in the ford, let fourteen
people walk over him without stirring, or allowing himself to be
seen: and at last rose, and, missing Schomburgk himself, struck the
beautiful Indian bride, the 'Liebling der ganzen Gesellschaft;' and
how she died in her bridegroom's arms, with horrors which I do not
record.

Strangely enough, this snake, so fatal to man, has no power against
another West Indian snake, almost equally common, namely, the Cribo.
{40} This brave animal, closely connected with our common water-
snake, is perfectly harmless, and a welcome guest in West Indian
houses, because he clears them of rats. He is some six or eight
feet long, black, with more or less bright yellow about the tail and
under the stomach. He not only faces the Fer-de-lance, who is often
as big as he, but kills and eats him. It was but last year, I
think, that the population of Carenage turned out to see a fight in
a tree between a Cribo and a Fer-de-lance, of about equal size,
which, after a two hours' struggle, ended in the Cribo swallowing
the Fer-de-lance, head foremost. But when he had got his adversary
about one-third down, the Creoles--just as so many Englishmen would
have done--seeing that all the sport was over, rewarded the brave
Cribo by killing both, and preserving them as a curiosity in
spirits. How the Fer-de-lance came into the Antilles is a puzzle.
The black American scorpion--whose bite is more dreaded by the
Negroes than even the snake's--may have been easily brought by ship
in luggage or in cargo. But the Fer-de-lance, whose nearest home is
in Guiana, is not likely to have come on board ship. It is
difficult to believe that he travelled northward by land at the
epoch--if such a one there ever was--when these islands were joined
to South America: for if so, he would surely be found in St.
Vincent, in Grenada, and most surely of all in Trinidad. So far
from that being the case, he will not live, it is said, in St.
Vincent. For (so goes the story) during the Carib war of 1795-96,
the savages imported Fer-de-lances from St. Lucia or Martinique, and
turned them loose, in hopes of their destroying the white men: but
they did not breed, dwindled away, and were soon extinct. It is
possible that they, or their eggs, came in floating timber from the
Orinoco: but if so, how is it that they have never been stranded on
the east coast of Trinidad, whither ti