Habits of the Common Snake in Captivity.

A Staffordshire Correspondent writes thus familiarly: 

“This has been a remarkably good season, both for vegetables and animals.  It has been a singular time for adders, snakes, and lizards; I never saw so many as I have seen this year in all my life.  I have been trying, a great part of this summer, to domesticate a common snake, and make it familiar with me and my children; but all to no purpose, notwithstanding I favoured it with my most particular attention.  It was a most beautiful creature, only 2 ft. 7 in. long.  I did not know how long it had been without food when I caught it; but I presented it with frogs, toads, worms, beetles, spiders, mice, and every other delicacy of the season.  I also tried to charm it with music, and my children stroked and caressed it; but all in vain:  it would be no more familiar with any of us than if we had been the greatest strangers to it, or even its greatest enemies.  I kept it in an old barrel, out of doors, for the first three weeks:  during that time, I can aver, it ate nothing; but, after a very wet night, it seemed to suffer from the cold.  I then put it into a glass vessel, and set it on the parlour chimney-piece, covering the vessel with a piece of silk gauze.  I caught two live mice, and put them in to it; but they would sooner have died of hunger than the snake would have eaten them:  they sat shivering on its back, while it lay coiled up as round as a ball of worstep.  I gave the mice some boiled potatoes, which they eat:  but the snake would eat neither the mice nor the potatoes.  My children frequently took it out in their hands, to show it to their schoolfellows; but my wife, and some others, could not bear the sight of it.  I one day took it in my hand, and opened its mouth with a penknife, to show a gentleman how different it was from that of the adder, which I had dead by me:  its teeth being no more formidable or terrific than the teeth of a trout or eel; while the mouth of the adder had two fangs, like the claws of a cat, attached to the roof of the mouth, no way connected with its jaw-teeth.  While examining the snake in this manner, it began to smell most horridly, and filled the room with an abominable odour; I also felt, or thought I felt, a kind of prickly numbness in the hand I held it in, and did so for some weeks afterwards.  In struggling for its liberty, it twisted itself round my arm, and discharged its excrements on my coat-sleeve, which seemed nothing more than milk, or like the chalkings of a woodcock.  It made its escape from me several times by boring a hole through the gauze; I had lost it for some days at one time, when at length it was observed peeping out of a mouse-hole behind one of the cellar steps.  Whether it had caught any beetles or spiders in the cellar, I cannot say; but it looked as fierce as a hawk, and hissed and shook its tongue, as in open defiance.  I could not think of hurting it by smoking it out with tobacco or brimstone; but