Out Into The Cool Grass By Some
Cowslips There Came A Small Dark Head.
It was an adder, verily a snake in
the grass and flowers.
His quick eye - you know the proverb, 'If his ear
were as quick as his eye, No man should pass him by' - caught sight of us
immediately, and he turned back. The hedge was hollow there, and the
mound grown over with close-laid, narrow-leaved ivy. The viper did not
sink in these leaves, but slid with a rustling sound fully exposed above
them. His grey length and the chain of black diamond spots down his back,
his flat head with deadly tooth, did not harmonise as the green snake
does with leaf and grass. He was too marked, too prominent - a venomous
foreign thing, fit for tropic sands and nothing English or native to our
wilds. He seemed like a reptile that had escaped from the glass case of
some collection.
The green snake or grass snake, with yellow-marked head, fits in
perfectly with the floating herbage of the watery places he frequents.
The eye soon grows accustomed to his curves, till he is no more startling
than a frog among the water-crowfoot you are about to gather. To the
adder the mind never becomes habituated; he ever remains repellent. This
adder was close to a house and cowshed, and, indeed, they seem to like to
be near cows. Since then a large silvery slowworm was killed just
there - a great pity, for they are perfectly harmless.
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