the night in his waggon, and I have no doubt communicated to his admiring Hottentot driver how he had shown the Englishman that he was a clever fellow. I have generally found that the most reasonable men are the purely uncultivated and the most highly educated; the intermediate states appear to carry out the saying, that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." A very short time ago I met a gentleman who erred much in the same manner as the Boer. I happened to mention the daring and perseverance of a celebrated African hunter, and that his sporting accounts were very interesting, when the gentleman to whom I refer told me that he had no patience with this hunter. His words were to the following effect: "I am no sportsman, as I never fired off a gun in my life, and therefore I cannot judge of his shooting. But I have read his book, and that story about pulling out the rock-snake carried such an air of untruth about the whole thing that I never wish to hear more about him." I asked why a man should not catch hold of a rock-snake if he liked, and in what was the air of untruth. "Why," he sapiently remarked, "it would have stung him to death at once." I immediately withdrew from the argument, but could not help thinking that this gentleman ought never again to be able to look a rock-snake, or any other of the boa species, in the face. The boa has many faults, but to accuse him of possessing poison, which I presume the gentleman meant when he said "sting," is really too bad. Had this snake's ghost known of the accusation that was brought against his whole species, and possessed one-half the wisdom that is attributed to the serpent, he would have risen, and hissed an angry hiss against so barefaced a libel. A man who enacts the part of a critic ought at least to know something of the subject on which he was speaking, and in this case should certainly have been aware that snakes are not rigged with a sting in their tails, like wasps, that none of the rock-snakes or boa-constrictors are poisonous, and that, as a rule, few snakes over eight or ten feet in length have the venom fangs. The want of knowledge neither prevented the Dutchman in Africa from disbelieving the existence of a building like Saint Paul's, nor the Englishman in England from casting disbelief on the mode of killing a snake in Africa.