"A very adroit and clever Constrictor was this, and he said nothing. But he chuckled to himself: 'If she makes me the same at both ends, I will have more fun than ever. With a mouth at each end, I can eat twice as many wild boars and be twice as happy.' He coiled closer to the ground with a look of affected submission, and the Witch went on with her Anathema. "It was a fine anathema, there was no question about it. Even the leaves on the trees about first turned brown, then crackled and then smoked, as she was making her few remarks. She completed the formula and departed, leaving the Constrictor to become the same at both ends, and he lay there, still chuckling, waiting for his double-headedness and double enjoyment in the future. "Then came to him a sort of quivery feeling, and he knew that he was changing. It did not take more than an hour at the utmost, when that Constrictor suddenly realized that he was the same at both ends, but--he did not have two heads! He had two tails! There he was, a great Boa Constrictor, sixty feet long, with a tail at each end. Of course only one thing could happen to a Boa Constrictor with a tail at each end. He must starve to death, simply because he could not eat. Day after day passed, and the Constrictor grew less and less in dimensions, and, finally, the day came when there was only a little worm, smaller than an angle-worm. Then the day came when there was no worm at all. "And that is the end of the story, because there isn't any more worm!" The last sentence of the tale was concluded. Silence prevailed for a moment or two, and then there was a gasp of delight and approval from Erastus. "That's bully!" he said. "Will you tell me some more, some other time, Mr. Abercrombie?" "Certainly, my boy," said Abercrombie. "It is well that we should become acquainted with natural history, and in the simple tales I tell you I shall endeavor at all times to introduce such information as will increase your store of knowledge. Above all, we must get acquainted with natural history." He paused. The boy had nothing to say. Unfortunately, nobody else had anything to say. To Abercrombie the silence seemed, in a vague way that he could not fully comprehend, destructive. There was something the matter with the atmosphere and he knew it. The gloaming had drifted into darkness, and he could no longer see either his prospective father-in-law or mother-in-law or his sweetheart. He knew only that, as an adviser of parents of the younger male offspring of the two who were also parents of his one object in life, he had flashed presumptuously in the pan, that, too, in the dimness of the gathering darkness, when people are most reflective and that he had accomplished the possibility irretrievable. The silence was broken at last by the voice of Mrs. Dobson. The voice was thin and didn't seem to really "break" the silence. It seemed to split it neatly.