Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 August 1887 — Snake Stories. [ARTICLE]

Snake Stories.

Mr. Joqh Bailey, of Brookville, Florida, was lounging in a hammock one hot afternoon when an ominous noise warned him that a rattlesnake was near by and ready for business. Mr. Bailey tumbled out of the hammock just in time to avoid the reptile’s spring, but recovered himself quickly and caught the snake by the neck while it was still in midair. Then he took the vicious reptile back to the woodshed, and laying its head on a block chopped it off with a hatchet. The snake was 7i feet long and nearly ten inches in circumference. It struggled desperately while in Mr. Bailey’s grasp, and winding its . coils around his arm almost crushed it. Sheriff Roberts, of Hart County, Georgia, was awakened from a sound sleep by the clammy touch of a huge snake which crawled directly over his face. The reptile’s belly felt like a big icicle, according to the Sheriff’s account of the incident, and seemed to take an hour in passing. Finally, to his great relief, the reptile drew its slimy length away, and the Sheriff struck a light and tried to find it. But the snake had disappeared, and, after a few minutes’ soarch, Mr. Roberts went back to bed. In the morning the servant while making up the bed found a chicken-snake, six feet long, coiled up between the feather bed and the mattress. Mr. Fletch Norris, of Montezuma, Ga., burned a brush heap down in his swamp near the river, not long ago, and threw into the pile a good-sized moccasin which his boys had captured that afternoon. A week afterward he visited the spot with his dog and saw wriggling about in the dead ashes the head and a few inches of the neck of the snake, while its body had burned to a crisp and broken oft'. The dog started in to have some fun with the remains of the reptile, but was bitten on the paw and gave it up. A Pennsylvania farmer removed a stump from a field recently and took from a root what he thought was a lot of knotted rope. After the supposed rope had lain in the sun awhile the farmer discovered that it was a mass of copperhead snakes twisted and interlaced together with the heads outward. They lrssed and squirmed in a horrible manner. Just then the farmer’s hired man came up, and with a couple of good clubs they succeeded in dispatching nearly two hundred serpents. Capt. Jack Bridges, of Columbus, Ohio, brought home with him from a hunting trip in Mexico a rattler which beats anything of the kind ever seen in Ohio. It is twelve feet long, has twen-ty-six rattles and a button, and is calculated to be able to spring seventeen feet. The Captain says he bagged it near Chihuahua while hunting for other game.