,
had no permanent effect in keeping down the serpent population.
Viviparous, creatures are a kind of specie-paying lot, but oviparous
ones only give their notes, as it were, for a future brood,--an egg
being, so to speak, a promise to pay a young one by and by, if nothing
happen. Now the domestic habits of the rattlesnake are not studied very
closely, for obvious reasons; but it is, no doubt, to all intents and
purposes oviparous. Consequently it has large families, and is not easy
to kill out.

In the year 184-, a melancholy proof was afforded to the inhabitants of
Rockland, that the brood which infested The Mountain was not extirpated.
A very interesting young married woman, detained at home at the time by
the state of her health, was bitten in the entry of her own house by a
rattlesnake which had found its way down from The Mountain. Owing to the
almost instant employment of powerful remedies, the bite did not prove
immediately fatal; but she died within a few months of the time when she
was bitten.

All this seemed to throw a lurid kind of shadow over The Mountain. Yet,
as many years passed without any accident, people grew comparatively
careless, and it might rather be said to add a fearful kind of interest
to the romantic hillside, that the banded reptiles, which had been the
terror of the red men for nobody knows how many thousand years, were
there still, with the same poison-bags and spring-teeth at the white
men's service, if they meddled with them.

The other natural features of Rockland were such as many of our pleasant
country-towns can boast of. A brook came tumbling down the mountain-side
and skirted the most thickly settled portion of the village. In the
parts of its course where it ran through the woods, the water looked
almost as brown as coffee flowing from its urn,--to say like smoky
quartz would perhaps give a better idea,--but in the open plain it
sparkled over the pebbles white as a queen's diamonds. There were
huckleberry-pastures on the lower flanks of The Mountain, with plenty
of the sweet-scented bayberry mingled with the other bushes. In other
fields grew great store of high-bush blackberries. Along the roadside
were bayberry-bushes, hung all over with bright red coral pendants in
autumn and far into the winter. Then there were swamps set thick with
dingy alders, where the three-leaved arum and the skunk's-cabbage grew
broad and succulent, shelving down into black boggy pools here and ther