nnaturally would, he stoned her, because it was a sign of the worst
kind of luck. He believed that warts came from playing with toads, but
you could send them away by saying certain words over them; and he was
sorry that he never had any warts, so that he could send them away, and
see them go; but he never could bear to touch a toad, and so of course
he could not have warts. Other boys played with toads just to show that
they were not afraid of having warts; but every one knew that if you
killed a toad, your cow would give bloody milk. I dare say the far
forefathers of the race knew this too, when they first began to herd
their kine in the birthplace of the Aryan peoples; and perhaps they
learned then that if you killed a snake early in the day its tail would
live till sundown. My boy killed every snake he could; he thought it
somehow a duty; all the boys thought so; they dimly felt that they were
making a just return to the serpent-tribe for the bad behavior of their
ancestor in the Garden of Eden. Once, in a corn-field near the Little
Reservoir, the boys found on a thawing day of early spring knots and
bundles of snakes writhen and twisted together, in the torpor of their
long winter sleep. It was a horrible sight, that afterwards haunted my
boy's dreams. He had nightmares which remained as vivid in his thoughts
as anything that happened to him by day. There were no poisonous snakes
in the region of the Boy's Town, but there were some large blacksnakes,
and the boys said that if a blacksnake got the chance he would run up
your leg, and tie himself round your body so that you could not breathe.
Nobody had ever seen a blacksnake do it, and nobody had ever seen a
hoop-snake, but the boys believed there was such a snake, and that he
would take his tail in his mouth, when he got after a person, and roll
himself along swifter than the fastest race-horse could run. He did not
bite, but when he came up with you he would take the point of his tail
out of his mouth and strike it into you. If he struck his tail into a
tree, the tree would die. My boy had seen a boy who had been chased by a
hoop-snake, but he had not seen the snake, though for the matter of that
the boy who had been chased by it had not seen it either; he did not
stop to see it. Another kind of snake that was very strange was a
hair-snake. No one had ever seen it happen, but every one knew that if
you put long horsehairs into a puddle of water and let them stay, the