forest-dwellers. His spear-shaped head pointed always directly forward, and he passed boldly and indifferently through dense thickets that hid him completely from view and across bare, sunlit places where the brilliant colors of his splendid body flashed and sparkled in the light.
Once, although the snake knew nothing of it and would have cared nothing had he known, a drowsy squirrel, idling away the lazy hot hours on a shady limb of a large oak, saw a wide, gray-green ribbon, braided with black, yellow-bordered, rhomboidal markings, slide smoothly and slowly across an open grassy space far below and vanish in a tangle of smilax beyond—and the squirrel shivered slightly before dozing off again, although his fear must have been wholly instinctive, since never in his short life had he been close enough to that gray-green ribbon to feel the paralyzing power of its glittering eyes. Once, too, a rabbit, stretched comfortably in her soft bed beneath a cassena bush, saw the big snake emerging from a clump of weeds six feet in front of her and, galvanized into instant action, bounded away to the right, making a reckless clatter among the crisp, dead leaves. Except these two, however, none of the keen-eyed woods creatures knew of the rattlesnake's passage across a mile or more of the flat floor of the forest so noiselessly did he glide through shadowed thickets and across sun-bathed,
