Spend two or three days
"for a change," although her home was only a couple of hours' ride
away, the reason probably was that her husband was in one of his bouts
and had made the place intolerable to her. I remember that she always
came to us with a sad, depressed look on her face, but after a few
hours she would recover her spirits and grow quite cheerful and
talkative. And of an evening when there was music she would sometimes
consent, after some persuasion, to give the company a song. That was a
joy to us youngsters, as she had a thin cracked voice that always at
the high notes went off into a falsetto. Her favourite air was "Home,
sweet Home," and her rendering in her wailing cracked voice was as
great a feast to us as the strange laugh of our grotesque neighbour
Gandara.
And that is all I can say about her. But now when I remember that
episode of the snake in the orchard, she looks to me not unbeautiful
in memory, and her voice in the choir invisible sounds sweet enough.
CHAPTER XVI
A SERPENT MYSTERY
A new feeling about snakes - Common snakes of the country - A barren
weedy patch - Discovery of a large black snake - Watching for its
reappearance - Seen going to its den - The desire to see it again - A
vain search - Watching a bat - The black serpent reappears at my feet -
Emotions and conjectures - Melanism - My baby sister and a strange
snake - The mystery solved.
It was not until after the episode related in the last chapter and the
discovery that a serpent was not necessarily dangerous to human
beings, therefore a creature to be destroyed at sight and pounded to a
pulp lest it should survive and escape before sunset, that I began to
appreciate its unique beauty and singularity. Then, somewhat later, I
met with an adventure which produced another and a new feeling in me,
that sense of something supernatural in the serpent which appears to
have been universal among peoples in a primitive state of culture and
still survives in some barbarous or semi-barbarous countries, and in
others, like Hindustan, which have inherited an ancient civilization.
The snakes I was familiar with as a boy up to this time were all of
comparatively small size, the largest being the snake-with-a-cross,
described in an early chapter. The biggest specimen I have ever found
of this ophidian was under four feet in length; but the body is thick,
as in all the pit vipers. Then, there was the green-and-black snake
described in the last chapter, an inhabitant of the house, which
seldom exceeded three feet; and another of the same genus, the most
common snake in the country.
