“Among other whoppers, I told her there was a varmint in Texas called the Santa Fé, that was still worse than the tarantula, for the best brass band in the country couldn’t cure their sting; that the creature had a hundred legs and a sting on every one of them, besides two large stings in its forked tail, and fangs as big as a rattlesnake’s. When they sting you with their legs alone, you might possibly live an hour; when with all their stings, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes; but when they sting and bite you at the same time, you first turn blue, then yellow, and then a beautiful bottle-green, when your hair all falls out, and your finger nails drop off, and in five minutes you are as dead as a door nail, in spite of all the doctors in America.” “Oh! My! Mr. Wallace!” said she. “How have you managed to live so long in that horrible country?” “Why, you see,” said I, “with my tarantula boots made of alligator skin, and my centipede hunting-shirt made of tanned rattlesnake hides, I have escaped pretty well; but these don’t protect you against the stinging scorpions, cow-killers, and scaly-back chinches, that crawl about at night when you are asleep! The only way to keep them at a distance is to chaw tobacco and drink whiskey, and that is the reason the Temperance Society never flourished much in Texas.” “Oh!” said she, “what a horrible country that must be, where the people have to be stung to death, or else chaw tobacco and drink whiskey! I don’t know which is the worst.” “Well,” said I, “the people out there don’t seem to mind it much; they get used to it after a while. In fact, they seem rather to like it, for they chaw tobacco and drink whiskey even in the winter time, when the cow-killers and stinging lizards are all frozen up!”