The sub-order which includes the greatest snakes in the world, as the boas, pythons, and anacondas, includes also some of the very smallest, tiny creatures not over an inch in diameter and a few inches in length. These snakes exhibit every variety of color and marking,--green, gold, crimson, white, black, brown, violet, yellow; they gleam in the splendors of the rainbow. I remember once on a crest of the Lehigh Mountains I was looking up some of the lower vertebrates, when, happening to glance over the side of a big stone on which I was sitting, I saw the most beautiful little snake that I could imagine. It was coiled up in the sun, and was only about ten inches long, and less than one inch in diameter. It was of a vivid emerald green color, and as the sun touched its tiny scales they seemed bordered and powdered with gold. The under part of its body paled to pea green and silver white, a few dots of red glittered about its neck and shoulders, like coral beads. Its wide-open mouth was reddish and bordered with yellow. Its tiny tongue played like lightning to and fro, caught the sunshine, and gleamed as if dipped in gold. Alarmed at seeing me, and afraid to leave its retreat on the sunny side of the stone, it erected its head with a low hiss, darted it from side to side, and seemed to try to frighten me away. Almost as pretty as this little dweller on the mountains are some of the water snakes, which are often iridescent, and change in tints of red, purple, crimson, orange, and green. Good swimmers and fishers, they pass a happy life among the lily-pads. LESSON XLI. WITH A HOUSE ON HIS BACK. And through the mossy wood-paths slow I see the silent tortoise go. The flecks of light, the shadows dim, The springing flowers, are naught to him; The dry pine needles are his bed, His house is always o’er his head, The fungus is his table spread. Several years ago, walking one morning in a wood in Pennsylvania, I surprised a wood turtle or box tortoise, eating his breakfast. The season had been rainy and many varieties of large fungus had attained a prodigal growth. The woods were full of what are popularly called toad-stools; many of them were of the diameter of a tea-plate, and stood five or six inches high. As I walked through the wood I observed that many of these fungi had been gnawed off evenly, as if cut by a knife, leaving only the central pillar intact. What had done this? I soon discovered; for moving noiselessly over the mossy earth, I came to a little opening, where grew one of the finest of these toad-stools, and there was a wood turtle taking his breakfast.