Snakes 103
to stay somewhere else. When she was gone, they went and killed the snake. Bimeby the little girl come home again, and then she found out her snake was killed. Arter that she kind o’ pined away and died.
“I’ve hearn ’em tell about that a good many times, and I s’pose that’s a pretty true story.”
the power of irish earth
“St. Patrick, as is well known, banished all snakes from Ireland some hundreds of years ago. There isn’t a snake in the whole country—they can’t live there. You may take a snake into Ireland in a big bottle, and as long as you keep the cork in, he’s all right; but let him breathe the air, or let him touch the earth or water anywhere in Ireland, I don’t care where, and he’s a dead man in less’n no time.
“Why, there was an Irishman made a bet with an American in Boston, that if he made a ring of Irish earth around a snake, the snake couldn’t get out of it. He bet seven hundred dollars, because that was all he had. Then he went over to Ireland, and got a little bag of sand from the shore near Dublin. When
