f somewhat muddy and breathing a little hard; but I was not
wholly chagrined. I had heard and seen a black-snake whistle. I had never
even known of the habit before.

Since then I have seen one other snake do it, and I think I have heard
the sound three or four times. It is almost indescribable. The jaws were
closed as it was made, not even the throat moving, that I could see. The
air seemed to be blown violently through the nostrils, though sounding as
if driven through the teeth--a shrilling hiss, fine and piercing, which
one not so much hears as feels, crisping cold along his nerves.

It may seem strange, but I believe this whistle is a mating-call. Even the
forked tongue (or maybe the nose) of a snake grows vocal with love. If
only the Sphinx had not possessed a heart of stone! No matter about its
lips; with a heart to know the "spring running" we should have heard its
story long ago. Perhaps, after all, the college sophomore was not mixing
his observations and Sunday-school memories when he wrote, describing the
dawn of a spring morning (I quote from his essay): "Beneath in the water
the little fishes darted about the boat; above the little birds twittered
in the branches; while off on a sunny log in the pond the soft, sibilant
croak of the mud-turtle was heard on the shore." If we could happen upon
the mud-turtle mad with love, I am sure we should find that he had a
voice--a "soft, sibilant croak," who knows?

I had long known the tradition among the farmers of the black-snake's
trailing its mate, following her by scent through grass and brush,
persistent and sure as a sleuth-hound, until at last she is won. I had
been told of this by eyewitnesses over and over, but I had always put it
down as a snake story, for these same witnesses would also tell me the
hoop-snake story, only it was their grandfathers, always, who had seen
this creature take its tail in its mouth and roll, and hit and kill a
fifty-dollar apple-tree (the tree was invariably worth fifty dollars). I
had small faith in the trailing tale.

One day, the summer after my encounter in the ferns, I was sitting upon a
harrow at the edge of the gravelly field that slopes to the swale, when a
large black-snake glided swiftly across the lane and disappeared in the
grass beyond. It had been gone perhaps a minute, when I heard another stir
behind me, and turning, saw high above the weeds and dewberry-vines the
neck and head of a second black-snake.

He was