tightly with the left hand and was pale, but his voice was steady
and gentle.

"Dear," he said, "don't be frightened, but I have been bitten by a
snake. A copperhead, I think. Get me some whiskey, please."

"The whiskey, Flora! Quick!" called the wife to her maid who stood by.
"Pour out a tumblerful and give it to him."

For herself, she fell upon her knees, seized her husband's wrist and
carried it to her mouth. This I saw, and heard the first words of his
startled protest as the dear lips closed upon the wound. I was out of
the room and clear of the house the next minute and speeding down the
path and hill to the lower pasture.

The snake was at large, and might waylay me from any bush or tuft of
grass. The moonbeams were ghostly and the stillness of the wide solitude
was eerie. Being but a child,--and a girl-child,--I thought of these
things, and of the likelihood of meeting runaway negroes, and mad dogs,
and stray sane curs whose duty it was to attack nocturnal trespassers,
and of a vicious bull never let out to roam the pasture except at night.
I was afraid of them all, intellectually. My heart was too full of a
mightier dread to let bugbears turn me back. I ran right on until the
branch, a silver ribbon on the dark bosom of the meadow, was before me.
Grasses and weeds were laden with dew, and the water whirled and
whispered about the roots. I could have believed that the purling formed
itself into words when I knelt down to fumble for the snake-bite cure. I
would not let myself be scared. I kept saying over and over--"To save
his life! to save his life!"

In the intensity of my excitement, language that I was afraid was
blasphemous, yet could not exclude from my mind, pressed upon me:--

"_He saved others. Himself he cannot save!_"

He might be dying now. He had said that the poultice ought to be applied
at once. Horrid stories of what had happened to people who were bitten
by rattlesnakes and cobras tormented me, and would not be beaten off.

"A copperhead, I think he said. How could he know that it was not a
cobra? Would he swell up, turn black, and expire in convulsions before I
could reach him?" I said "expire in convulsions," out of a book.
Everyday Virginia vernacular fell short of the exigency.

My feet were drenched, my pantalettes and skirts were bedraggled up to
the knees, my eyes were large and black in my colorless face, when I
burst into the chamber, and threw the bunch of priceless herbs int