We fell in with a sordid lout, and up to this day I am sorry we did not thrash him or duck him in the river. We had gone up to a farm-house on the bluff to buy milk and eggs for dinner. Two old women had very kindly served us, and we were coming away when the lout appeared. He was evidently the master of the place: a big, raw-boned, ragged-whiskered, and dirty-skinned brute. He had just caught a snake, about two feet long, and he held it wriggling in his hand, while he laughed a vile chuckle, and opened his filthy mouth in derision as the older woman, his mother, probably, fled, almost screaming with terror. Then he came toward us, and seeing Smith's bare ankles he deliberately put the snake down to bite them, chuckling all the time, and mumbling: "You hain't got the sand! He won't bite. I ain't afeard. I've got the sand. I ain't afeard o' snakes," and so on.
We stepped away from him, and at last told him, in a tone he minded, to drop the snake. He did so at once. His mother said to him from the door: "If you did that to me, and I was a man, I'd kill you!"
Then the brute insisted on selling us ten cents' worth of honey, which he called "Th' bam'f a thaousand flaours" (balm of a thousand flowers); and, coming to the boat, he begged for a drink,
