The districts of Ardgour and Sunart have always had an unenviable notoriety for the great numbers of adders and grass snakes to be found in them, the reptiles frequently attaining to a size unknown, we believe, anywhere else in the West Highlands. Within the last two or three years we have noticed that they are rapidly becoming numerous in Lochaber, much more so than they used to be, though the general opinion, in which we heartily concur, is that we were getting on very well without them. During an ornithological ramble among the hills a few days ago, we knelt to drink at a fountain that we fell in with, welling up cool and sparkling beside a large moss-covered drift boulder among the heather, when we were not a little startled by the presence of no less than three adders that lay coiled together in a sort of Gordian knot on a patch of green moss close by the fountain's brink. The day was hot and dry, and they had probably come there to drink and bathe; but we were very thirsty, having just smoked a pipe on the top of the hill, and there being no appearance of water anywhere else for miles around, and knowing, besides, that there could be really no danger, even if the vipers had been ten times larger and more venomous than they were, we drank a long draught of the pure sweet water, and then proceeded with the stick in our hand to attack the enemy, and soon had the satisfaction of knocking them into wriggling, writhing bits, and crushing their heads under our heel. Our assault was so sudden and unexpected that they had no time to show fight; otherwise an adder, when his blood is up and thoroughly on his guard, is an ugly customer to attack with no better weapon than a walking-stick, and nothing can be imagined more deadly, wicked-looking, and savage than such an animal, as with erected crest and flashing eye he steadies himself in act to strike. It is curious that the poison of these reptiles, though certain death if commingled in sufficient quantity with the blood through an abrasion or wound, is perfectly innocuous if taken into the stomach--a fact, by the way, that has been known from very early times. On taking our drink, for instance, from yonder viper-guarded fountain, we recollected that Lucan had something on a somewhat similar circumstance in his Pharsalia. Describing Cato and his soldiers coming to a fountain of water in the desert, and how horrified they were to find innumerable serpents of the deadliest kind--asps and dipsades--disporting themselves in and around the pool, he has the following fine passage, the finest indeed in the poem, which we took care to turn up when we reached home:--