d the way to the
well. The cobra, knowing the vicious habits of the other snake, and
anticipating that it would kill the innocent child which it had so
recently spared, at first refused, and only yielded on condition that
the infant was not to be molested. But the polonga, on reaching the tub,
was no sooner obstructed by the little one, than it stung him to death.]

[Footnote 2: In a return of 112 coroners' inquests, in cases of death
from wild animals, held in Ceylon in five years, from 1851 to 1855
inclusive, 68 are ascribed to the bites of serpents; and in almost every
instance the assault is set down as having taken place _at night_. The
majority of the sufferers were children and women.]

[Footnote 3: PLINY notices that the serpent has the sense of hearing
more acute than that of sight; and that it is more frequently put in
motion by the sound of footsteps than by the appearance of the intruder,
"excitatur pede saepius."--Lib, viii. c. 36.]

_Cobra de Capello._--The cobra de capello is the only one exhibited by
the itinerant snake-charmers: and the truth of Davy's conjecture, that
they control it, not by extracting its fangs, but by courageously
availing themselves of its well-known timidity and extreme reluctance to
use its fatal weapons, received a painful confirmation during my
residence in Ceylon, by the death of one of these performers, whom his
audience had provoked to attempt some unaccustomed familiarity with the
cobra; it bit him on the wrist, and he expired the same evening. The
hill near Kandy, on which the official residences of the Governor and
Colonial Secretary are built, is covered in many places with the
deserted nests of the white ants (_termites_), and these are the
favourite retreats of the sluggish and spiritless cobra, which watches
from their apertures the toads and lizards on which it preys. Here, when
I have repeatedly come upon them, their only impulse was concealment;
and on one occasion, when a cobra of considerable length could not
escape, owing to the bank being nearly precipitous on both sides of the
road, a few blows from my whip were sufficient to deprive it of life.[1]

[Footnote 1: A Singhalese work, the _Sarpados[=a]_, enumerates four
castes of the cobra;--the _raja_, or king: the _bamunu_, or Brahman; the
_velanda_, or trader; and the _gori_, or agriculturist. Of these the
raja, or "king of the cobras," is said to have the head and the anterior
half of the body of so light a