The young man had a specialty.  He had several specialties, but to one yielded all the rest.  He had an eye to chipmunks, and had made most inefficient traps for them and hoped some day to catch one, but they were nothing to speak of.  As for the minnows in the creek, had he not caught one with a dipper once, and had he not almost hit a big pickerel with a stone?  He knew where the liverwort and anemones grew most thickly in the spring and had gathered fragrant bunches of them daily, and he knew, too, of a hollow where there had been a snowy sheet of winter-green blossoms earlier, and where there would soon be an abundance of red berries such as his mother liked.  At beech-nut gathering, in the season, he admitted no superior.  As for the habits of the yellow-birds, particularly at the season when they were feeding upon thistle-seed and made a golden cloud amid the white one as they drifted with the down, well, he was the only one who really knew anything about it!  Who but he could take the odd-shaped pod of the wild fleur-de-lis, the common flag, and, winding it up in the flag’s own long, narrow leaf, holding one end, and throwing the pod sling-wise, produce a sound through the air like that of the swoop of the night-hawk?  And who better than he could pluck lobelia, and smartweed, and dig wild turnips and bring all for his mother to dry for possible use, should, he or his father or she catch cold or be ill in any way?  Hopes for the future had he, too.  Sometimes a deer had come in great leaps across the clearing, and once a bear had invaded the hog-pen.  The young man had an idea that as soon as he became a little taller and could take down the heavy gun, an old “United States yager” with a big bore, bloodshed would follow in great quantities.  He had persuaded his father to let him aim the piece once or twice, and had confidence that if he could get a fair shot at any animal, that animal would die.  Were it a deer, he had concluded he would aim from a great stump a few feet distant from the house.  If a bear came, he would shut the door and raise the window, not too far, and blaze away from there.  But in none of all these things, either present exploits or imaginings for the future, was his interest most entangled.  His specialty was Snakes.

Not intended by nature for a naturalist was this youthful individual whose specialty was snakes.  Very much enamored was he of most of nature’s products, but not at all of the family ophidia.  Snakes were his specialty simply because he did not approve of them.  All dated back to the affair of three years before.  Snakes were abundant in the wood, but were not of many kinds.  There were garter-snakes, dreaded of the little frogs, but timid of most things; there was a small snake of wonderful swiftness and as green as the grass into which it darted; there were the water pilots, sunning themselves in coils upon the driftwood in the water, swart of color, thick of form and offensive of aspect; there were