cleared the land and cultivated it. It was great fun for me to go there with father and my older brothers. We stayed there all day. We cook- ed our meals and ate out in the field, and had real picnics. There was abundance of strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, cherries and hazel and beech nuts in their season. We ate all we could and took dishfuls of them home. It was the worst place I ever saw for snakes; we were always in dread of them. We would not dare to go barefooted there. We pulled our sock legs over our pants to keep the snakes from going up and biting us. One dav a neighbour boy was stowing hay on a loft; when a snake got pitched up with the hay. It got under his clothes and bit him many times, he got frantic and jumped down on the hard floor. He was badly hurt and bitten, butihe got well without very serious results from his terrible experience.

H 012/ 4 Snake Take; His Meals

A snake takes his meals whenever he can get them, unless he is al- ready too full for any more. I have found some so full they could scarcely move. An average sized snake can swallow an average sized frog or toad; it is interesting, but not pleasurable, to watch him do it. It looks cruel and distressing but it is not so distressing to the toad or frog as one might suppose it to be. The snake will glide near a frog or await its approach and gently catch it by a hind leg and suck it into his mouth so smoothly that the frog makes very little, if any, resistance; it seems to have no pain. It may be the snake has some kind of dope to stupefy the frog, or mesmerise it. One might think the snake would choke with such a big mouthful. but he can expand his mouth wonderfully. The frog goes down tail first—or from where his tail was when he was little. When the snake gets the frog down to its front legs, he tucks them, one at a time, into the sides of his mouth; he gives his mouth a twist somewhat like a boy does when tucking in a big mouthful. As the frog’s head disappears its eyes are open and bright and it seems to be comfortable. If the snake were killed immedi- ately'and the frog taken out of him it would be dead or beyond restor- ation to life. The squeezing it got might account, in part, for that, but likely the snake saliva is powerful and acts quickly. I never let a snake

escape if I could kill him. I feared and hated them. People have a

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