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.
