[Footnote 1:  A Singhalese work, the Sarpados[=a], enumerates four castes of the cobra;—­the raja, or king:  the bamunu, or Brahman; the velanda, or trader; and the gori, or agriculturist.  Of these the raja, or “king of the cobras,” is said to have the head and the anterior half of the body of so light a colour, that at a distance it seems like a silvery white.  The work is quoted, but not correctly, in the Ceylon Times for January, 1857.  It is more than probable, as the division represents the four castes of the Hindus, Chastriyas, Brahmans Vaisyas, and Sudras; that the insertion of the gori instead of the latter was a pious fraud of some copyist to confer rank upon the Vellales, the agricultural caste of Ceylon.]

A gentleman who held a civil appointment at Kornegalle, had a servant who was bitten by a snake and he informed me that on enlarging a hole near the foot of the tree under which the accident occurred, he unearthed a cobra of upwards of three feet long, and so purely white as to induce him to believe that it was an albino.  With the exception of the rat-snake[1], the cobra de capello is the only serpent which seems from choice to frequent the vicinity of human dwellings, doubtless attracted by the young of the domestic fowl and by the moisture of the wells and drainage.

[Footnote 1:  Coryphodon Blumenbachii. There is a belief in Ceylon that the bite of the rat-snake, though harmless to man, is fatal to black cattle.  The Singhalese add that it would be equally so to man were the wound to be touched by cow-dung.  WOLF, in the interesting story of his Life and Adventures in Ceylon, mentions that rat-snakes were often so domesticated by the native as to feed at their table.  He says:  “I once saw an example of this in the house of a native.  It being meal time, he called his snake, which immediately came forth from the roof under which he and I were sitting.  He gave it victuals from his own dish, which the snake took of itself from off a fig-leaf that was laid for it, and ate along with its host.  When it had eaten its fill, he gave it a kiss, and bade it go to its hole.”  Major SKINNER, writing to me 12th Dec., 1858, mentions the still more remarkable case of the domestication of the cobra de capello in Ceylon.  “Did you ever hear,” he says, “of tame cobras being kept and domesticated about a house, going in and out at pleasure, and in common with the rest of the inmates?  In one family, near Negombo, cobras are kept as protectors, in the place of dogs, by a wealthy man who has always large sums of money in his house.  But this is not a solitary case of the kind.  I heard of it only the other day, but from undoubtedly good authority.  The snakes glide about the house, a terror to thieves, but never attempting to harm the inmates.”]

The young cobras, it is said, in the Sarpa-dosa, are not venomous till after the thirteenth day, when they shed their coat for the first time.