ed on the sky. Now and again, but
very rarely, they wheeled high over our heads in silence, or with a
distant, dying scream; and then, with a fresh impulse, winged fleetly
forward, dipped over a hilltop, and were gone. They seemed solemn and
ancient things, sailing the blue air: perhaps coeval with the mountain
where they haunted, perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions
may have shouted to behold them on the morn of battle.

But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes--the
rattlesnakes' nest, it might have been named. Wherever we brushed among
the bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz. One dwelt habitually in
the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for firewood, thrust up his
small head between two logs, and hissed at the intrusion. The rattle has
a legendary credit; it is said to be awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to
stamp itself for ever in the memory. But the sound is not at all
alarming; the hum of many insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the
ear of danger quite as readily. As a matter of fact, we lived for weeks
in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles sprung on every side, and
it never occurred to us to be afraid. I used to take sun-baths and do
calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea and calcanthus, the
rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-wheels, and the combined
hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at any sudden movement; but I was
never in the least impressed, nor ever attacked. It was only towards the
end of our stay, that a man down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on
the terrifying nature of the sound, gave me at last a very good
imitation; and it burst on me at once that we dwelt in the very
metropolis of deadly snakes, and that the rattle was simply the
commonest noise in Silverado. Immediately on our return, we attacked the
Hansons on the subject. They had formerly assured us that our canyon was
favoured, like Ireland, with an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles;
but with the perfect inconsequence of the natural man, they were no
sooner found out than they went off at score in the contrary direction,
and we were told that in no part of the world did rattlesnakes attain to
such a monstrous bigness as among the warm, flower-dotted rocks of
Silverado. This is a contribution rather to the natural history of the
Hansons than to that of snakes.

One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the
rattle from the first; an