One Gilson is said to have died of the bite of a rattlesnake in this town early in the present century.  After this there was a great snake-hunt, in which very many of these venomous beasts were killed,—­one in particular, said to have been as big round as a stout man’s arm, and to have had no less than forty joints to his rattle,—­indicating, according to some, that he had lived forty years, but, if we might put any faith in the Indian tradition, that he had killed forty human beings,—­an idle fancy, clearly.  This hunt, however, had no permanent effect in keeping down the serpent population.  Viviparous, creatures are a kind of specie-paying lot, but oviparous ones only give their notes, as it were, for a future brood,—­an egg being, so to speak, a promise to pay a young one by and by, if nothing happen.  Now the domestic habits of the rattlesnake are not studied very closely, for obvious reasons; but it is, no doubt, to all intents and purposes oviparous.  Consequently it has large families, and is not easy to kill out.

In the year 184-, a melancholy proof was afforded to the inhabitants of Rockland, that the brood which infested The Mountain was not extirpated.  A very interesting young married woman, detained at home at the time by the state of her health, was bitten in the entry of her own house by a rattlesnake which had found its way down from The Mountain.  Owing to the almost instant employment of powerful remedies, the bite did not prove immediately fatal; but she died within a few months of the time when she was bitten.

All this seemed to throw a lurid kind of shadow over The Mountain.  Yet, as many years passed without any accident, people grew comparatively careless, and it might rather be said to add a fearful kind of interest to the romantic hillside, that the banded reptiles, which had been the terror of the red men for nobody knows how many thousand years, were there still, with the same poison-bags and spring-teeth at the white men’s service, if they meddled with them.

The other natural features of Rockland were such as many of our pleasant country-towns can boast of.  A brook came tumbling down the mountain-side and skirted the most thickly settled portion of the village.  In the parts of its course where it ran through the woods, the water looked almost as brown as coffee flowing from its urn,—­to say like smoky quartz would perhaps give a better idea,—­but in the open plain it sparkled over the pebbles white as a queen’s diamonds.  There were huckleberry-pastures on the lower flanks of The Mountain, with plenty of the sweet-scented bayberry mingled with the other bushes.  In other fields grew great store of high-bush blackberries.  Along the roadside were bayberry-bushes, hung all over with bright red coral pendants in autumn and far into the winter.  Then there were swamps set thick with dingy alders, where the three-leaved arum and the skunk’s-cabbage grew broad and succulent, shelving down into black