One day, meeting the elder Cadet in the street returning alone from the bird-market--a very unusual occurrence, for they generally hunted in couples--we asked after the daughter, and hearing she was _ammalata assai_, and wanted one of our little pills to set her to rights, turned in with the mother, and found the young _naturalista_ reclining on an ill-stuffed _bergère_, with a large Coluber coiled round her temples, and a half-prepared Hoopoe in her hand. In the same apartment were a vulture picking an old shoe to pieces under the belly of an Esquimaux dog, and some little land-tortoises nibbling away at a large lettuce in the middle of the floor. Our inquiries were somewhat embarrassed by the unusual circumstances of our patient, particularly by the presence of the snake, which now began to untwist. "See! he has recognised his master," said the dame: "or perhaps has raised his head with a view of taking part in the consultation." We had seen snakes entwining the lovely brow of Medusa, in marble, cameo, and intaglio--painted snakes in clusters hissing in the hair of the Eumenides--but a living snake wound round living temples we had never seen till to-day. "Come, sir, you are only the _snake_ to Esculapius; and though I am not ungrateful for what you have done in refreshing my hot forehead with your cool skin, now the _doctor_ is come, _bon giorno_!" and, removing him like a turban from her head, she placed him in a box at her side. This was, then, that Epidaurian Coluber which we had so frequently seen in marble effigy wound round the consultation cane of the God of Physic,[6] and not to be viewed by us alive for the first time without interest. "Mother," said the younger Cadet, brightening up when she perceived this, "bring our snake-boxes, and let us show them all to the _dottore_." In less than five minutes the cases were before us. The first contained a mother blind-worm and her viviparous family of ten offspring, not two inches long, while she stretched to about twelve. A Coluber Natrix inhabited the second. "He is a great favourite with children in Sardinia," said Cadet, "twisting himself round their arms, and sucking milk from their mouths; but if these supplies fail, he feeds on frogs and fish. His flesh is a sovereign remedy, say our doctors, in skin diseases; and they also say--but you know best how true this may be--that one of the late Dukes of Bavaria became a father by merely eating fowls that had been fattened on them." A Coluber Austriacus followed--a rare snake, and chiefly remarkable for his pleasant herbaceous smell, very unlike what proceeded from a neighbouring box, holding a Coluber Viperinus, who secretes, when irritated, a yellow fluid of intense foetor, like the mixed stinks from asafoetida and rotten eggs. The specimen in this box was large. It had vomited, we were told, two frogs the day after its capture; and on cutting open another of the same species, Annetta had seen a living toad creep, Jonas-like, from the