INGOLSBY had no fear of snakes when I first knew him. At least he said he had none, and I believed him. He was no snake-charmer, nor the type of idiot who loves to keep one in his pocket and produce it at a breakfast table and give it milk. Ingolsby would have been the first to style an ass the man who meddled with a snake unnecessarily, and agreed that if an argument arose with one of them it was best to use a stick and use it quickly. For all that he had no horror of them, and used to smile when some friend of his would spring convulsively aside at sight of any ugly coil upon the path. He maintained, I think, that unless one gratuitously irritated them or stood between a female and its eggs, no snake would ever attack one voluntarily, and that any reptile could be stepped over quite safely if you took care not to touch it. Leave them alone, he used to say with real conviction, and they will leave you alone.

He had no answer for the sceptic who asked how any one could tell when he was between a mother and her brood, but none the less he stuck to his point and deprecated senseless fear of them.

He certainly appeared to practise what he preached, for

I remember well how, as we sat breakfasting on his verandah, something about a yard long dropped from the thatched roof close beside his chair. My feet were on the table in a second, but Ingolsby quite placidly put the last of his toast and marmalade in his mouth and watched what he called a harmless rat-snake drag itself slowly off into the garden.

I admired his nerve and told him so, but he only shrugged his big shoulders and remarked that it was a case in point and bore out the truth of his contention. He believed, of course, in taking ordinary precautions. It was stupid to wander barefooted about one's house, or to walk there or on a path by night without a lamp, especially at the beginning of the rains, when all snakes like to come out of the wet grass and undergrowth and lie in open ground. Also it was well to look behind boxes before you shifted them, and investigate your bathsponge before you used it, in case something lay coiled beneath it; but that, he said, was only common-sense.

He was as full of theories on the subject as an egg of meat, and one of them he quoted constantly, which was, that snakes are stolid things by nature, not easily roused except by bodily hurt, and generally

him! "Sha nono," the milkdrinker who mouths the udders of the sleeping cows, drinking his fill the fellow like a long black whip-lash who travels quicker than a man can run. A short thick brown snake crawls from some matted hedge. If his belly be pure white they say he will not harm you with his bite; if it be of a dingy greyish-yellow he is a danger but who waits to see? A thin red-brown cord is wound about a verandah pole or door-post watching, watching. Brush against him, and you die.

So through all the nasty list of them-thin snakes, thick snakes, long and short, black, brown, green or grey, snakes that crawl sluggishly, snakes that move rapidly, harmless or venomous, lazy or lively, all are Machija the biters of Hausaland, and hateful wherever you find them.

That was my view of them, a view I never failed to impress on Ingolsby; but the more vehement my diatribes became the more he laughed at them and chaffed me on my senseless fears.

house, and as we talked of the old times, the intervening years dropped out, linking us once more in youth's friendship. We drank our coffee on the verandah, for the night was hot and heavy with a coming storm.

Far away on the north-east horizon the lightning winked and flickered with dim flashes, showing just the faint outline of the sweet-scented shrubs and the line of hedge beyond. A cricket shrilled incessantly among the grass roots, paining the ear-drums with its vibration.

We talked of this and that, recapturing as friends do after long absence the spirit of the bygone, taking pleasure in the retrospection.

Suddenly my eye lit on a long thin lash slowly writhing out out of the shadows across the floor of beaten earth.

"An old friend of yours," I told him. "I remember they never worried you, but I detest them still as much as ever."

There was no answer from Ingolsby's chair. I glanced at him in surprise, expecting, I

I lost sight of him for some years, and when we met again he had grown older. Time's passage had greyed his hair and cut the lines deeper in his face; and though in most respects he was the Ingolsby of the earlier days, I noticed that he was quieter, less selfassured. We celebrated the reunion with a dinner at my

rejoinder that he invariably used to make when snakes were mentioned.

The change in him was astounding. He sat forward in his chair, gripping the armrests so tightly that the whiteness of the knuckles gleamed in the lamp-light. His face was grey with terror, and his eyes, wide-staring and a little glassy, followed the reptile's sinuous

I spoke to him, but he seemed not to hear my voice, and kept his gaze, like a man in trance, upon the moving horror.

Not until the snake's tail had drawn itself with slow deadliness off the last step into the darkness did the spell break. Ingolsby sank back with a a little gasp, the tension of his body relaxed, and his eyes closed for a moment.

Presently he wiped his forehead, on which the sweat-drops had welled with the reaction, and rather shakily drank the brandy I poured out for him. It steadied him in a few moments, and in an embarrassed way he apologised, as men do, for making a fool of himself. "Sorry," he said. "It made you wonder, I expect. . . . I, who never minded them, used to jeer at you and all the other fools, called you cowards. . . . I was the fool. It sickens me to think of the twaddle I talked, the didactic stupidity of it, my cock-a-hoop assurance on the subject. . Thought I knew all about the habits of the inoffensive creatures!... Idiot. I've altered my opinions since those days."

And in a little while, after he had pulled himself together, he told me why.

Some years back, after a wearisome journey through uninteresting country, he had camped in an out-of-the-way spot where an old disused resthouse standing lonely in the bush offered the only shelter to

uninhabitable; the roof gaped everywhere, letting in the almost daily rain of the wet season, but in a dry corner of the wide verandah whose sagging thatch still clung to rough supporting poles, he made shift to have his bed put up under a canvas sheet slung overhead to catch the dirt and droppings of the bats. It was a miserable, noisome hole, but the best that he could find, and with the philosophy born of long experience, he sat upon his bed and made his preparations for turning in. turning in. After a long day of rain the sky was clearing, and the watery moon shone into the verandah so that he could see down the whole length of it to where his boxes and camp-kit were piled up at the other end. He tapped out the dottel of his finished pipe, kicked off his shoes, and with a yawn slipped into his blankets and lay down.

And down by his feet something moved!

His first spasmodic movement drew his feet up, humping his knees beneath the blankets. It was purely automatic, done without thought of what lay there at the bed's end. The idea of its being a snake was not the first to come into his mind. Rat, lizard, scorpion, or perhaps a toad-it might be any of those; but before he could sit up and jump clear of the blankets he felt over his instep and between his ankles a long dry slither-and he knew. He kept perfectly still. He

was not afraid, he said, just curious, and remembering the old Ingolsby I thought that that was true-it was logical at least. He summoned all his theories to assist him, impressed upon himself the necessity for absolute stillness, remembering how a sudden movement was liable to irritate and lead to an attack. I can almost believe he plumed himself upon his chance of proving the truth of what he had always maintained. He was a strange fellow.

After the slow wriggle between his bare feet all movement ceased, but down there in the arch beneath his knees he knew the snake was crawling, or else waiting for some move of his.

The minutes passed; the strain began to tell on him a little, and he felt an overpowering desire to lift the blanket to see what was happening below. He resisted the impulse fiercely, forcing himself to lie motionless, but the effort cost him heavily in will power, and for the first time imagination began to work insidiously on his brain during that terrible waiting. He began to wonder what it would be like to be bitten; where he would feel the sharp curving fang; when he would know that the bite was venomous. He strove to think what he could first lay his hands upon to use as a ligature, to tie above the wound if it were on a limb; where was his razor, the permanganate, all the quickneeded essentials in a mishap

of this kind. He dared not dwell upon what failure to find the things would mean. He tried to memorise the exact places where they lay. They were distressing thoughts; he must struggle clear of them.

Still no movement down below, and faint hope began to rise up in him that the creature might have slipped away to one side of the bed, unnoticed by him, and be trying to escape through the edges of the blanket displaced by the sudden rising of his knees. His hope turned almost into certainty when he softly shifted his right foot an inch, and felt no answering movement. It must have gone, found an opening and slipped silently away, while he was torturing himself with awful imaginings of what might happen.

And almost he reassured himself, deciding he would give himself just one more minute's grace, when he felt across his left hip-bone the deadly furtive creeping touch again. It was coming on to him, across his stomach to his chest! Mercifully it was outside his pyjama jacket-he could feel the sweet relief of the coarse cotton between it and his skin. He could not have borne the direct contact, he was certain; he must have screamed and sprung upright at that. As it was, a deadly fear and nausea came upon him for the first time. There was something menacing and devilish about this unhurried hateful persistence with which the unseen thing came on.