Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 October 1893 — PULLING A SNAKE’S TOOTH. [ARTICLE]

PULLING A SNAKE’S TOOTH.

The Amateur Dentists and the Elevea Foot Boa Constrictor. Edward Schmidt, the proprietor of the bird store on Twelfth street, the other morning enjoyed the usual privilege of playing dentist to an eleven foot boa constrictor. His royal pythonic highness weighs just sixty pounds, and is valued at $1 per pound. One of the most remarkable features of his make-up is bis mouth. It is a common phrase to hear of the “dropping of one’s lower jaw” in moments of consternation, but Mr. Boa can get up the largest amount of consternation in this line when he gets ready by dropping about six inches of lower jaw, linear measurement. He can raise an equal amount of upper jaw at the same time, and his mouth is provided with a convenient lateral hinge arrangement by which it can be spread sidewise and pretent a total receptive surface of abont. the size of a bandbox.

It was this mouth, with a good, serviceable set of teeth, but no poison, fangs, that got Mr. Bnake into trouble toon after his arrival in the national capital. He was lodged in a good strong wire cage and fed a few pigeons. Then, instead of going to sleep gorged with, food, as is supposed to be the habit of his family, Mr. Constrictor amused himself by striking at his master, who was putting a re-enforoement of wire netting around the bars of the cage. He miscalculated in one of his springs,, and when, hissing like a steam exhaust pipe, he launched about four feet of-his-neck across the cage, he hung himself up ia the wire netting by his teeth. As a result he had a very sore mouth for a couple of days, and Mr. Schmidt decided that he would have one of the injured teeth pulled. It was a delicate operation to handle his snakeship, who, if given his choice of holds, is a good deal more than a match for a man in a catch-as-catch-can wrestling bout. But the wily bird man took an unfair advantage of his prisoner, and, diverting his attention in front, executed a flank movement and grabbed him by the back of the neck. Then it was a case of pull Richard pull Satan in getting the lengthy southerner out of his cage. He finally came with a slip and a slide, and Mr. French, the assistant dentist, promptly froze on to the last foot and a hair of the tail as it slid out of the cage.

Mr. Snake, stretched at full length, with no chance to work his powerful Constrictor muscles, was rather at a disadvantage, but watching an opportunity while the doetdr was working on bis head with a pair of wire nail pullers, he threw a half Nelson lock around Mr. French’s legs and proceeded to mix up with that gentleman in a way that was no less surprising than inconvenient. The tooth, which was loose, came out easily, looking not uplike a large fishbone, and the two amateur dentists then exerted themselves to let go of the snake and get him back in his cage. Mr. French was finally got out of the embrace of the python’s coils, and the two operators wrestled him back into captivity, where he drew himself up on a shelf in the corner of his cage, and, coiling himself into a larms figure 8, lay with his almond-shaped head on the top of his coils and swore fluently in an unintelligible South American dialect at every one who came in his neighborhood. —[Washington Post.