hat went on legs. I reached for the hat, bent over, and
pulled it off, and, lo! not a walking snake. Just an ordinary snake, but
with it a live wood-frog!

This, at least, was interesting, the only real piece of magic I have ever
done. Into my hat had gone only a live snake, now I brought forth the
snake and a live frog. This was a snake to conjure with; so I tied him up
again and finally got him home.

The next Sunday the minister preached a temperance sermon, in which he
said some dreadful things about snakes. The creatures do seem in some
dark, horrible way to lurk in the dregs of strong drink: but the minister
was not discriminating; he was too fierce and sweeping, saying, among
other things, that there was a universal human hatred for snakes, and that
one of the chief purposes of the human heel was to bruise their scaly
heads.

I was not born of my Quaker mother to share this "universal human hatred
for snakes"; but I did get from her a wild dislike for sweeping, general
statements. After the sermon I ventured to tell the preacher that there
was an exception to this "universal" rule; that all snakes were not adders
and serpents, but some were just innocent snakes, and that I had a
collection of tame ones which I wished he would come out to see.

He looked astonished, skeptical, then pained. It was during the days, I
think, of my "probation," and into his anxious heart had come the thought,
Was I "running well"? But he dismissed the doubt and promised to walk over
in the morning.

His interest amazed me. But, then, preachers quite commonly are different
on Monday. As we went from cage to cage, he said he had read how
boa-constrictors eat, and wouldn't I show him how these snakes eat?

We had come to the cage of the little ribbon-snake from the picnic grove,
and had arrived just in time to catch him crawling away out of a hole that
he had worked in the rusty mosquito-netting wire of the cover. I caught
him, put him back, and placed a brickbat over the hole.

I knew that this snake was hungry, because he had had nothing to eat for
nearly a week, and the frog which appeared so mysteriously with him in my
hat was the dinner that he had given up that day of his capture in his
effort to escape.

The minister looked on without a tremor. I took off the brick that he
might see the better. The snake was very long and small around and the
toad, which I had given him, was very short and big around, so that when
it was