"Neither of us said a word of the affair itself, for John didn't seem to know that he had been frightened, and I was afraid to alarm him by speaking of it. He asked no questions of any sort, although in general he is a miniature Paul Pry, expressed no surprise that I was bareheaded and bloody, or that we had come so far from the fishing place and left our tackle behind. His face expressed confusion, such as a child will exhibit when he is waked suddenly by falling out of bed, and commences grasping around the bedpost preparatory to getting in again. I knew that something frightful was there, and felt that we had escaped some great peril, but what the object or what the peril I had no idea whatever. I am sure, however, that the notion of a snake never entered my mind, but if any thing tangible, if was of a wild cat, for the recollection of Cooper's panther story in the Pioneers occurred to me, and I cut a stout hickory sapling to be prepared. We arrived with slow steps at the haunted spot, for both were exhausted, and I felt the value of prudence. There lay my basket by the beech root, more by token that the hogs had found it and were just devouring the last morsel of bread and meat so carefully deposited therein. "There was my fishing line, but the eight-pounder had become weary and worn, and carried off my Limerick hook. There was my hat near the honeysuckle bush, but the phantom itself, with its diamond eyes and mystic powers, was gone. Frightened probably by the hogs, unromantic objects in every point of view, he had fled; but I found him within fifty yards in the form of a _rattlesnake_, full six feet from tip to tip, and glorying in fourteen full rattles. "I had my revenge in every possible form. I looked at him for ten minutes at a time, but the power was gone, and I only saw two keen, devilish-looking eyes. Then I punched him till he spent all his venom on my stick. Then I made him drunk on tobacco juice, ingloriously and brutally drunk. "Getting tired at last, I gave him the _coup de grace_, skinned him, and returned home. He hangs now in loops over my family bed. Those eyes that thrilled my heart so strangely are dim with dust. Those fangs, which in a few minutes more would probably have sent death to the heart's fountain of my boy, are now in Europe, a part of the collection admired by countless crowds at the British Museum. The subject is fast fading from my memory,'mid the cares of life, and had you not asked me to write it out for you, I should have thought of it but a little longer. Let it stand as another testimony, and a most unwilling one, too, of the fascinating powers of serpents on the human." So far my correspondent tells his own tale in language sufficiently plain and explicit. If any figure him out as a man of feeble frame and low stature, let them change their fancy at once.