The Great Horned Serpent: Adventures of a Modern Dragon Hunter

MYSTERY stories are always popular, and, of all the forms of animal lore, snake stories are by far the most alluring to the general reader. This I know because for years I conducted a newspaper ‘woods and waters’ column, and nothing printed therein about bird or beast or fish or flower stirred half so much interest as the occasional items concerning snakes. There is a strange and potent fascination in the serpent — that ‘ divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of the earth,’ as Ruskin called it. The very life of my column depended upon letters sent in by readers; and whenever interest seemed to flag and these voluntary contributions were few, I had only to print some curious bit of serpent stuff to start the letters again. Immediately a dozen correspondents, ranging from unlettered woodsmen to doctors of philosophy, would be reminded of some similar adventure of their own. Still more abundant would be the response if the original item involved a mystery or posed a question about the ways of serpents. Then would come pouring in a flood of letters, often suggesting out of personal observation some interesting solution of the mystery; and the contributions thus received would suffice to fill my column for a week.

Now I believe that, in respect to this deep interest in and curiosity about the serpent kind, the readers of the Atlantic are in no wise different from the readers of that little column of my newspaper days. Hence this article hopefully solicits their aid in an effort to solve the most alluring mystery in the whole field of American serpent lore.

The Great Homed Serpent — or the horn snake, as he is commonly called — is known to thousands of honest folk all over the United States; yet those haughty intelligentsia, the herpetologists or snake scientists, utterly deny his existence. They assert impatiently that there is not and never has been such a creature. Nevertheless, in spite of their angry thunders, he lives on, fascinating, sinister, stubbornly refusing to die — a myth, if you will, but a myth so virile, so widespread, and upheld by so numerous and so respectable a company, that he cannot be dismissed as mere moonshine unworthy of the attention of serious men.

There is something in him, not tangible perhaps, but seemingly immortal; and it is safe to say that many readers of the Atlantic have encountered him. Perhaps those readers, aware that myths sometimes have a singular intrinsic virtue and a little resentful of the dogmatism of the scientists, will lend their aid in this adventurous attempt to track the monster to his lair and thus resolve the most beguiling (I had almost said) of all American mysteries.

I

The Great Horned Serpent is no vulgar newcomer in the land. He was here, apparently, when all this continent was a wilderness. From the Indians and the pioneer settlers the old chroniclers heard many reports of the horn snake, and one of the most intelligent, if least known, of their interpreters, Dr. John H. Logan, gives in his rare and precious history, published in 1859, a summary of the early accounts of this strange creature which reveals impressively the respect in which it was held.

‘Besides the rattlesnake,’ says Logan, ‘there was one other, in the early periods . . . that is worthy of a brief notice. Around the history of the horned serpent there hangs an obscurity, which, perhaps, no research will ever fully clear away. Some, indeed, have wholly denied that such a reptile was found on the Continent. Others admit its primitive existence and describe it as a curious and harmless creature. There are others, again, who, while they regard it as having once belonged to the catalogue of our native serpents, describe it as possessed of a venom whose fatal energy no antidote was ever known to master.’

To this last group Logan himself adhered. He accepted the horn snake as an authentic member of the early fauna of America, though he believed that it was never common. ‘Among the innumerable facts,’ he exclaims, ‘that may be gathered from natural history illustrative of God’s goodness, there are few more deserving of notice than this rareness of a reptile so fierce and deadly as the horn snake must unquestionably have been. Had it been as abundant as the other venomous species, the Indians even, though furnished with their most potent antidotes, could hardly have inhabited the country. It possessed scarcely a single redeeming feature; there was nothing of the admirable craft of the eyes — nothing of the beautiful changing colors or characteristic magnanimity of the rattlesnake — but with dull eye, insensate skin, and vengeful spite, ready to dart its dreadful sting into every approaching intruder, it lay a horrible compound of all the hated qualities of its race — the incarnation of death.’

The evidence upon which Logan appears to rely is partly the testimony of early travelers like Lawson — who claims to have seen two horn snakes and who describes them as being ‘like the rattlesnake, but rather lighter,’ as hissing ‘exactly like a goose,’ and as striking at their enemies with their lethal tail ‘armed at the end with a homy substance like a cock’s spur,’ in which a deadly poison was concealed — and partly the stories of old men and women of his time, who evidently talked much of the horn snake whose sting they considered even more formidable than the rattlesnake’s fangs. One such story he relates, upon the authority of ‘James Taggart, Esq. and others,’ which is admirably dramatic.

‘On an afternoon, nearly forty years ago,’ he says, ‘a party of gentlemen were riding from Abbeville village (in South Carolina) towards the Calhoun settlement, and when approaching the place now known as the Cabins, they passed a dwelling near the wayside, just at the moment when a little girl, whom they had seen to cross the road some distance ahead of them, gave a piercing shriek, and ran back into the house in an agony of pain and fright. Perceiving that something serious had occurred, they hastily alighted to ascertain the matter; and entering the room, found the child stretched upon a bed, and already a corpse. She had lived long enough, however, to whisper to her mother that a snake had struck her while she was in the act of gathering firewood on the roadside. The party instantly sought the spot, and there discovered a large specimen of the horn snake which they dispatched. The skin of this serpent was stuffed, and preserved by an intelligent gentleman of the neighborhood, and it was long an object of great curiosity at his residence, and afterwards at Old Cambridge, where it was last seen.’ The ‘intelligent gentleman,’ Logan tells us in a footnote, was Captain Thomas Parker.

II

That horn snake was killed more than a century ago. Let us note next another startling adventure of more recent occurrence.

‘A man was walking along an abandoned wagon road through the woods,’ said the gentleman who told me of this incident, ‘when he heard a terrific rustling in the bushes that bordered the road, accompanied by a hissing sound similar to that of air or steam escaping from a small pipe. Looking, he saw coming towards him an enormous snake of a size and kind that he had never before seen. As it was evident from the demeanor of the thing that it meant to attack him, the man seized a rail from an old fence that was close at hand, and, after a battle in which the snake tried with all the ferocity of a tiger to reach him, he killed it. The neighbors were then summoned to view this strange member of the reptile kingdom, and this is what they saw: —

‘A snake slightly smaller at the largest portion of its body than a pint tomato can, nearly black in color with dingy white markings, somewhat like the markings of a king snake or thunder snake, but sufficiently different to preclude confusion of the two; whose length was a foot greater than the width of the wagon road across which it lay, and whose tail, instead of tapering to a point, ended bluntly, being somewhat larger than and about the shape of a man’s finger if we imagine the nail removed. The strange make-up of the creature, coupled with its savageness, would have been sufficient to excite the wonderment of the people that saw it. But this was not all. From the extremity of the tail and pointing upward at an angle of about forty-five degrees there protruded a corneous growth the size of a large rooster’s spur, an inch or more in length, black, and tapering, like the tail, to a somewhat blunt point. This spur, sting, or whatever it was, was scraped into with a knife and found to be of a composit ion similar to that of an animal’s horn — in fact, it resembled that of a cow in miniature but for the fact that it grew perfectly straight except in its relation to the snake’s body.’

Some twenty-five years have passed since this ferocious horn snake of the abandoned wagon road met the end it deserved. But it is not necessary to go back a century or a quarter century in order to find this most dreaded member of the ophidian race. He is apparently just as much a reality to-day as he ever was, and if you will look for him you are sure to find him — not in the woods or fields or waters, perhaps, but virtually everywhere else. The other day I found two horn snakes in a drug store. That is to say, I found them in the sense in which I had always found the horn snake — a gentleman, who was standing near while I was conversing with my friend the druggist, informing me that he had seen two horn snakes in his day and that at a certain place where he had once lived these deadly reptiles were of common occurrence.

He did not go into details, but others often do. Thus there was told a few years ago in a county newspaper the story of the slaying of a mighty horn snake in Rocky Bottom, a horn snake which was promptly held responsible for many mysterious cases of sudden death among the cattle. This Rocky Bottom monster was nine feet long and as thick as a man’s thigh; and the news of its demise brought from a wellknown citizen of a neighboring district the statement that he had killed two horn snakes a short time before, one at Big Estatoe and the other at Standing Rock, each of them between six and seven feet in length and ‘as large as a man’s leg at the knee.’ In general appearance, he declared, they resemble a rattlesnake, ‘except that some six or eight inches below the neck there are stripes that run up and down, and their heads are thick from top to bottom instead of being broad from side to side. The horns on the end of their tails are something like a cock’s spur, except larger, and in the end of the horn is a stinger.’ Both these snakes, when shot, acted precisely as did the Rocky Bottom snake, which ‘violently brought its tail over its back and stuck it into the ground.’

Not long ago there came into my hands a horn-snake tale which interested me more than most narratives of the sort because in this instance the narrator was known to me. ‘I was walking along a narrow path,’ said this correspondent, ‘ when, nearly under my feet, I saw a thick, blunt-headed snake, about two feet long. It was lying in a long loop, head and tail near together. I told my aunt to watch it and I would go to the house and get something to kill it. I found a fence pole, went back, and struck the snake amidships. . . . I took the snake and laid it on the piazza that we might examine it. The appearance was a dull, mottled green, but, on looking closely, it was yellow, with a fine green crossbar over it. Under, where its feet should be, was yellow. I punched the horn on its tail, about the size of a man’s little finger, sharp at the end anti the consistency of a cow’s horn. It is the only snake I have seen that was not afraid and made no effort to get away. It just lay in the path and its eyes glittered.

‘Remembering that, as a child, I had heard the country people say that Hart Island was infested with “horned snakes that run after you,” I wrote to my father describing the snake. He had heard of them, but never saw one. He asked General X of Virginia about them. General X said they were in Virginia; that they lay in a loop, raising half of the body from side to side, and frequently the sharp horn would catch in a bush or small tree and then it would bleat like a calf when unable to get loose.’

III

Now what are we to think of these and the many other tales that are told of the horned serpent, tales agreeing in many respects not only with one another but also with the stories of the old travelers and explorers, and yet widely divergent as to other details? But first, perhaps, one should ask whether it is permissible to think of these tales at all. The herpetologists and scientists in general are by now so indignant over the irritating vitality of the horn snake that they consider it scarcely respectable to speak of the creature except in terms of opprobrium and ridicule.

That, one may venture to suggest, is scarcely the proper scientific attitude. There may never have been just such a monster as Lawson’s horn snake which hissed like a goose and carried death and dissolution in its tail; or Logan’s horn snake which so swiftly slew the little girl of the wayside house; or those horn snakes of Virginia which bleated like calves, according to General X. And we may be quite sure that nowhere except in superheated imaginations did there ever exist those even stranger forms of the horn snake which many of the Southern plantation Negroes (and not a few white men) believe in firmly — horn snakes which take their tails in their mouths and roll along like hoops and have been known to kill trees by striking their horns into the trunks and poisoning the sap. Yet, however impossible these chimeras may be, there is so much smoke here that there must be at least a few sparks of fire; and it should be our business to seek patiently for those sparks, those atoms of truth, for by patient seeking they may all some day be discovered.

One morning there came to me from a certain little town a letter conveying this startling information: ‘I am sending you by to-day’s express a small sting or horn snake which was killed by Mr. W. McK. of this place yesterday. Mr. McK. says when he struck the snake on its head it came over and stuck its tail or horn an inch or more into the ground. Mr. G. S. says he knows this to be a sting snake as he has seen them before. I hope the one I am sending you will bring some proof that there are such things, but, speaking for myself, I do not know the name of the snake. When the snake was killed his tail was much harder than it is now and more whitish.’

With what trembling excitement I gazed at the box which that letter heralded may easily be imagined. Here, perhaps, was the key to the mystery, the great secret — an actual specimen of the mystical monster, albeit a baby one, about which were told so many tales of terror; the most ubiquitous and yet most elusive of serpents, of which one heard on every hand but which one could never see. Here at last was a horn snake in the flesh! Eagerly I removed the wrappings of the box and, raising the cover, looked in — and beheld the familiar form of Ophisaurus ventralis, that little legless lizard which is commonly known as the glass snake (since, having no legs, he looks exactly like a serpent and not at all like a lizard) and which is one of the commonest of American reptiles.

I collapsed like a pinpricked bubble. Never was there a more disappointed mortal. My ‘horn snake’ was not the far-famed mysterious monster after all, but this little creature which I had known from boyhood, which I had supposed was well known to nearly everybody else, and which, even in its moments of greatest rage — if it ever has such moments — could not do serious injury to a field mouse!

That was a tragic anticlimax; but the minutes that followed brought a lift of the spirits which atoned, in a measure at least, for my first disappointment.

For after all, whatever else it might be, this was a horn snake. It was evidently the reptile which in the district from which this specimen came was known as the horn snake; and thinking over the matter, and recalling some of the other descriptions of horn snakes which I had heard, I was convinced that here in this box was the explanation of many of those tales — the atom of truth which was at the bottom of at least a part of that great mountain of fancy and error.

Here, undoubtedly, was the explanation of the small green or greenishyellow horn snakes of which one hears from time to time and which are supposed to be the young of the species — horn snakes like the one described by the correspondent who mentioned General X with his story of calf-like blcatings. No glass snake ever bleated like a calf, and unquestionably the worthy General had lent too credulous an ear to the Virginia spinners of serpent yarns; but that calf-like bleating was merely an added frill, based upon nothing save hearsay, and the absurdity of which was evident on its face. What interested and pleased me was the fact that here was plainly revealed one source of the horn-snake myth. The mysterious monster, in one of its several forms, had been run down and identified at last.

How has it happened that so innocent and harmless a creature as Ophisaurus, the glass snake, a timid and gentle reptile which feeds on worms and insect grubs and which is less capable than a sparrow of inflicting injury upon a human being, has acquired so evil a reputation that it is feared by many as much as the rattlesnake itself? What is there about the animal which could have given rise to the notion that it bore on its tail an envenomed horn with which it would inflict a fatal wound upon anyone who came within its reach ?

The question, instead of being difficult, is really easily answered; and the answer is an odd illustration of the strange and devious ways in which animal myths sometimes originate.

No ordinary normal glass snake would be mistaken for a horn snake and classed among the most formidable denizens of the woods. Before that dubious honor is conferred upon it, the glass snake must undergo a certain transformation. Like many of the lizards which possess legs, this legless and serpent-like member of the family is able at will to discard its tail. The tail is the most exposed portion, the portion most likely to be seized by some pursuing enemy; and when it is pursued and seized in this fashion, perhaps by some larger reptile such as the swift black snake or racer, the glass snake immediately, with a quick, convulsive motion, uncouples its tail which the black snake has gripped in its jaws. The discarded tail, although thus basely deserted by its owner, plays its part loyally. It writhes and wriggles violently in the jaws of the black snake, and some minutes elapse before the latter gets it under control, and in such a position that it may be swallowed. Meanwhile the tailless glass snake has taken advantage of the diversion to make its escape.

It goes on its way rejoicing, and, even if it knew how to worry about anything, it would not worry about the loss of its tail, because nature can be relied upon to supply a new one. This she proceeds to do; but she is not able, with all her seemingly miraculous powers, to make a very good job of it. The new tail which grows where the old one had been is but a poor imitation of the original. Whereas the old tail formed more than half of the total length of the creature, the new tail is not over two or three inches in length, thinner than the rest of the body, of a different color, and tapering at the end rather sharply to a point. In this changed guise the animal, though still easily recognizable as a glass snake, is strikingly unlike its old self; and it is the glass snake in this new guise, the glass snake which has lost its original tail and acquired this shorter and thinner substitute, which is the feared and fabled horn snake, the sinister villain of so many thrilling stories.

It was a glass snake of this sort — one which had lost its first tail and grown another and much smaller one — which was sent to me as a horn snake; and as I looked at the creature lying in the box and noted the marked difference in size and color between the body of the animal and the thinner, palebrown tail, hard and horn-like to the touch and somewhat resembling a rather slender, tapering horn or spur, it was not very difficult to understand how the widespread error regarding it arose and how it happens that there are so many truthful and intelligent people who insist, in spite of all the herpetologists in the world, that there is such a reptile as the horn snake because they themselves have seen it.

IV

So far so good; one source of the myth has been discovered. That there are other sources is, however, certain. The horn-snake stories are divisible roughly into two classes, those that picture the reptile as of small size and of generally greenish hue and those that picture it as of great size and of various clearly marked patterns. Ophisaurus the glass snake is the source of the stories of the former group, but it certainly is not the inspiration of the latter, for the glass snake never exceeds three feet in length, while most specimens are much shorter.

Hence the mystery is only partly cleared away, and the more fascinating part remains — the part which has to do with such monsters as the mighty horn snake of Rocky Bottom, with the savage creature of the abandoned wagon road, and with those strange dragons of the early days which move in such awful majesty across the pages of the old explorers. Not even the mad, quivering terror which seizes upon so many persons at sight of a serpent of any kind could transform the little Ophisaurus into one of those gigantic ophidian ogres; and we must seek somewhere else the root of the widespread belief, prevalent now as in pioneer times, in the existence of tremendous and formidable horned serpents, some of them longer than a man and a foot or more in circumference.

The pitfalls are treacherous, but there is much that lures the adventurer on. And at the outset let me give, for a good reason which shall presently be made clear, one more excerpt from an old writer — a bit of serpent lore which, for all its fantasy, would be worth remembering if only because of its rare beauty.

‘Between two high mountains,’ wrote James Adair, woodsman, trader, and historian of the Indians, ‘nearly covered with old mossy rocks, lofty cedars and pines, in the valleys of which the beams of the sun reflect a powerful heat, there are, as the natives affirm, some bright old inhabitants, or rattle snakes, of a more enormous size than is mentioned in history. They are so large and unwieldy that they take a circle almost as wide as their length to crawl round in their shortest orbit; but bountiful nature compensates them the heavy motion of their bodies; for, as they say, no living creature moves within reach of their sight, but they can draw it to them.

‘Nature endues them with proper capacities to sustain life; as they cannot support themselves by their speed, or cunning to spring from an ambuscade, it is needful they should have the bewitching craft of their eyes, and forked tongues. The description the Indians give of their colour is as various as what we are told of the camelion that seems to the spectator to change its colour by every different position he may view it in; which proceeds from the piercing rays of light that blaze from their foreheads, so as to dazzle the eyes, from whatever quarter they post themselves — for in each of their heads there is a large carbuncle, which not only repels, but they affirm, sullies the meridian beams of the sun. They reckon it so dangerous to disturb these creatures that no temptation can induce them to betray their secret recess to the profane.’

Thus quaintly wrote Adair, preserving for us a strange legend, current among his Cherokee friends, about the rattlesnake. Now suppose that the rattlesnake had been a rare creature even in the early days, seen by very few white men, and becoming more and more rare until, at a comparatively early period, it became extinct, so that very little was ever written about it except such stories as this of Adair obtained from the Indians; or that of Bernal Diaz, the historian of Cortez’s march, who says in his description of the great temple of Mexico, ‘In that accursed house, they kept vipers and venomous snakes, which had something at their tails that sounded like morris bells, and these are the worst of vipers’; or that of Thomas Campanius, who declares that in ‘New Sweden’ there is ‘a large and horrible serpent which is called a rattlesnake,’ which makes with its tail a noise ‘like children’s rattles,’ and which ‘has a head like that of a dog, and can bite off a man’s leg as clear as if it had been hewn down with an axe.’ Suppose that these queer mixtures of fact and grotesque fancy were all the evidence that we had concerning the existence of the rattlesnake. Is it not highly probable that most of us would dismiss the rattlesnake as a purely mythical monster, a creature which never existed, a being too wildly chimerical ever to have lived on earth?

Certainly it is at least barely possible that we have fallen into just such an error in adopting an attitude of utter disbelief regarding the great and terrible horn snake of the early chroniclers. Their horn-snake stories are in themselves no more fantastic than these early accounts of the rattlesnake; yet we know that there were rattlesnakes in the pioneer days, though they did not bear blazing carbuncles in their heads or bite off men’s legs. So, too, it is possible that there were great horn snakes then — real horn snakes, huge and venomous and justly dreaded by the Indians, though we may safely assume that they did not possess all the strange powers attributed to them.

It is only the fact that the rattlesnake was abundant and has lived on to our own day that has saved it from being consigned to the realm of the fictitious. How can we be perfectly sure that in dismissing the ancient horn snake — which, even according to the old chroniclers, was very rare when the white men first came — we have not made such a mistake as that would have been?

V

This theory is plausible enough as far as it goes. But the Great Homed Serpent whose trail we are following is not extinct. On the contrary, there are thousands of persons now living who are confident that they have seen him; and obviously for these modern talcs of mighty horn snakes some other explanation must be found. Here should be mentioned, perhaps, an explanation with which some have sought to dismiss the whole matter — namely, the suggestion that the large horn snake of to-day is really the red-bellied snake, Farancia, a harmless burrowing reptile, which carries on its tail a tiny needlelike spine. This is much too summary a procedure. While it is possible that both the red-bellied snake and its first cousin Abastor, the rainbow snake, are partly to blame for the horn-snake myth, it is certain that neither of these timid and degenerate burrowers is the fierce and terrible homed serpent of so many lurid tales. It is far more likely, I think, that most of the responsibility for that swaggering reptilian desperado rests upon Pituophis, the bull snake or pine snake, a super!) and regal serpent, one of the kings of his tribe, found in one form or another throughout the greater part of the United States.

So far as I am aware, no one has ever before accused Pituophis of such duplicity. Yet there are several good reasons for pointing a suspicious finger at the bull snake, and it is strange that he has never been called to account.

His magnificent dimensions — he is sometimes nine feet long — compare favorably with those of the mighty horn snake of the stories. In the second place, a peculiar arrangement of his glottis enables him to hiss much more loudly than most other serpents, and this at once recalls the many storied horn snakes whose loud hissing was one of their most startling characteristics. In the third place, Pituophis is capable of berserker rages, and a man coming upon him suddenly might well be terrified half out of his wits by this huge, hissing, furious serpent which looks as if it were about to annihilate him, though in reality it is only seeking a chance to escape. In the fourth place, the extreme end of the bull snake’s tail is hard and homy to the touch, and, while this horny part is probably never more than a half inch long even in the largest specimens, a half inch might easily become several inches in the eye of an excited man or woman in the frenzy of ‘serpent panic.’ And in the fifth place, there is historical evidence, apparently overlooked altogether by those who have puzzled their heads about the horn-snake mystery, that the bull snake in former years actually bore the name of horn snake. ‘These serpents,’ wrote William Bartram, describing the bull snake about a century and a half ago, ‘are also called hornsnakes, from their tail terminating with a hard, horny spur, which they vibrate very quick when disturbed, but they never attempt to strike with it.’

All this, together with the fact that bull snakes vary almost as widely in color as the horned serpents of the talcs, constitutes a pretty strong case against Pituophis, We see in him, I believe, the hissing monster of the abandoned wagon road, the gigantic horn snake of Rocky Bottom, the great horn snakes of Big Estatoe and Standing Rock, and many another horn snake of these later days whose huge size and formidable aspect have excited the fear and wonder of all who saw it; and we may fairly confidently write Pituophis down as one of the most important sources of the horn-snake myth.

Yet, even when this is done, all is not yet explained; for Pituophis the bull snake, having no venom in him, may frighten but cannot kilt men, women, or little children. We learn from Bartram that in his time the bull snake was sometimes called the horn snake; but Bartram declares that the bull snake, a species well known to the country folk, was regarded as harmless; and there existed then, just as there existed long before then and just as there exists to-day, a widespread belief in a huge and deadly horned serpent. Was this deadly creature always and invariably merely Pituophis in disguise, transformed into a man-killing monster by the fears of the ignorant? Perhaps. But what of the horned serpent that slew the little girl of the wayside house? And what of the man-killing horn snake of the Indians, whose wound the red men did not even attempt to cure? Were they also deceived by Pituophis — those copper-colored children of the forest who lived so close to the wild creatures and were supposed to have such intimate knowledge of them all?

VI

It is a puzzling problem; and though up to this point we have marched along bravely, we must now consider carefully the several paths among which we must choose.

It is possible, as we have seen, — though few will deem it probable, — that there really existed in the early days a distinct species of great and dangerous horned serpent. It is possible, on the other hand, that the huge and supposedly deadly horn snake of the early days was only Pituophis, the harmless bull snake, and that all tales, whether old or new, of death dealt by homed serpents are utterly false. Or, disliking both these theories, we may suppose — if we are given to spirited and venturesome speculation — that occasionally there is bom into the world, through some caprice of nature, a rattlesnake whose rattle develops abnormally, the rings or segments coalescing and forming a solid spur or horn; and, bold as this suggestion is, it would explain so much so satisfactorily that, having once evolved it, I cannot bear to give it up.

It is noticeable that in many of the horn-snake tales the reptile is said to resemble a rattlesnake. This is true, for instance, of an especially interesting narrative sent to me by a well-known clergyman who has lived much in the country and who described the killing of a horn snake which was examined carefully not only by himself but also by his wife and his son, seventeen years old, and his two daughters of nineteen and fifteen years.

This snake was bayed in a dry ditch by a fox terrier. ’The snake looked so much like a rattlesnake,’ says the clergyman, ‘that we caught the dog and I killed the snake, thinking still that it was a regular rattlesnake. When we pulled it out of the ditch we found that it was not a rattler, but that, in place of the rattle, a continuation of the end of the tail was a sharp, flinty, polished horn or point, the hard point or horn being about an inch and a quarter long. The horn was of the hardness or more of a gamecock’s spur. It did not stand at an angle to the body of the snake, but was a continuation of it. . . . The horn was not hollow when cut off, as it was. It had no stinger in it that we could see. The snake was the shape and color of a rattlesnake, maybe a little bit duller in color.’ Knowing that this snake was ‘agin’ natur’ ’ and that his account of it would be disputed and laughed at, the clergyman kept the carcass, intending to have it preserved and sent to Washington. But, being busy with his crop, he was unable to go to town, and the odor of the reptile became so prodigious that the specimen was thrown away.

A thousand times I have lamented bitterly the fact that this otherwise excellent clergyman was not equipped with olfactory nerves capable of enduring the utmost agonies of martyrdom. There is no telling what was lost when that precious carcass was allowed to perish. And yet, no matter what secret it might have revealed, the result, after all, would hardly have been decisive. We may strip the mask from the dreaded horn snake and show that there is nothing mysterious behind it — that only little Ophisaurus is lurking there, or Pituophis the bull snake, or Farancia the red-bellied snake, or the rainbow-hued Abastor, or, at most, Crofalus the rattlesnake, a formidable creature, but long ago described and figured in books and labeled on the museum shelves. Yet, though we thus destroy the myth utterly, it will rise again from its ashes, and the Great Homed Serpent, in all his panoply of mystery and terror, will live on.

He is immortal. Sigurd, when he went out against the dragon Fafnir on the Glittering Heath, had an easy task compared with the man who tries to exorcise this horned ophidian dragon of to-day. As the living serpent, with every change of its skin, seems to renew its youth, so the serpent myths, which man has cherished from remote antiquity, gain new life with every change of form and never grow old or stale, but seem destined to live on, awful and yet vividly alluring, forever.