colour, that at a distance it seems like
a silvery white. The work is quoted, but not correctly, in the _Ceylon
Times_ for January, 1857. It is more than probable, as the division
represents the four castes of the Hindus, Chastriyas, Brahmans Vaisyas,
and Sudras; that the insertion of the _gori_ instead of the latter was a
pious fraud of some copyist to confer rank upon the Vellales, the
agricultural caste of Ceylon.]

A gentleman who held a civil appointment at Kornegalle, had a servant
who was bitten by a snake and he informed me that on enlarging a hole
near the foot of the tree under which the accident occurred, he
unearthed a cobra of upwards of three feet long, and so purely white as
to induce him to believe that it was an albino. With the exception of
the _rat-snake_[1], the cobra de capello is the only serpent which seems
from choice to frequent the vicinity of human dwellings, doubtless
attracted by the young of the domestic fowl and by the moisture of the
wells and drainage.

[Footnote 1: _Coryphodon Blumenbachii._ There is a belief in Ceylon that
the bite of the rat-snake, though harmless to man, is fatal to black
cattle. The Singhalese add that it would be equally so to man were the
wound to be touched by cow-dung. WOLF, in the interesting story of his
_Life and Adventures in Ceylon_, mentions that rat-snakes were often so
domesticated by the native as to feed at their table. He says: "I once
saw an example of this in the house of a native. It being meal time, he
called his snake, which immediately came forth from the roof under which
he and I were sitting. He gave it victuals from his own dish, which the
snake took of itself from off a fig-leaf that was laid for it, and ate
along with its host. When it had eaten its fill, he gave it a kiss, and
bade it go to its hole." Major SKINNER, writing to me 12th Dec., 1858,
mentions the still more remarkable case of the domestication of the
cobra de capello in Ceylon. "Did you ever hear," he says, "of tame
cobras being kept and domesticated about a house, going in and out at
pleasure, and in common with the rest of the inmates? In one family,
near Negombo, cobras are kept as protectors, in the place of dogs, by a
wealthy man who has always large sums of money in his house. But this is
not a solitary case of the kind. I heard of it only the other day, but
from undoubtedly good authority. The snakes glide about the house, a
terror to thieves, but never attempting to h