It is estimated that nine to ten thousand _natives_ are killed annually in Bengal alone by snakes; and throughout India, at a rough calculation—probably very much under the mark—twenty thousand persons lose their lives from this cause every year. There is no perceptible diminution in the number of these deadly reptiles; on the contrary, they are seemingly increasing, notwithstanding that government puts a price on the head of every snake destroyed; and small though the reward may be, indigent peasants are not slow to avail themselves of it, and a snake that ventures to show itself rarely survives the discovery. The cry of _Sámp!_ (snake) has a magical effect on the most apathetic and inert of natives.
Those whose experience of snakes is acquired in the ‘Zoo,’ can form but a faint idea of the rapidity with which the indolent-looking ophidian can move when so inclined; and were one to escape from its glass cage in that interesting collection, the agility of its movements would only be equalled by that of the astonished spectators towards the outer air. Were the habits of the snake family more aggressive and less retiring than they are, this sprightliness would be inconvenient beyond measure; and but for this tendency to shun man and escape from him at all times, the bill of mortality, which Sir Joseph Fayrer has shown us is frightfully large, would be infinitely greater than it is. Happily, self-preservation is an instinct as strong in serpents as in the hares of our fields.
But to return to the European in India and his share of risk incurred. There are obvious reasons why so large a percentage of our Aryan brethren fall victims. Barefooted and barelegged, and with that belief in _kismet_ (fate) which, sometimes to his advantage, oftener to his prejudice as a man of the world, imbues the soul of ‘the mild Hindu,’ he trusts his bronzed nether limbs unhesitatingly in places where snakes are known to abound, and it is only a question whether or not he happens to touch one. With that sublime indifference to the danger, acquired by custom and a familiarity with it from his babyhood, he coils himself up, with or without his scanty garment of cotton stuff, on the bare earthen floor of his mud-hut, or beneath the spreading branches of a tree, and falls into a sleep, from which neither mosquitoes nor the chorus of predatory jackals, nor the screech-owls in the branches above, can rouse him. Many a time, perhaps, he has seen a snake killed on that very spot. But what does it matter to Ramcherrun or Bojoo? Are not snakes in other places too? In one minute he is snoring out the watch of night. He dreams of his rice and paddy fields, mortgaged at ninety per cent. interest, and ever likely to remain so; he dreams of his _mahájon_ (banker), whose superior knowledge of the three Rs enabled that rascal to so circumvent his neighbours. Then he turns over, and rolls quietly on the top of the deadly krait; or stretching out his brown hand, grasps the tender back of a passing cobra, which bites him, and he dies! The gods had it so. His time was come—_kismet! kismet!!_ Toolsi Kándoo is re-thatching his house, and in uplifting the old rotten grass, squeezes a roof-snake (_sankor_) reposing therein, which resents the intrusion with its sharp teeth, and Toolsi is gathered to his fathers. Then there is Sirikisson Beldar cutting bamboos for his new roof, or the jungle grasses which are to furnish his house with matting, and the foe is molested, and makes his bite felt—before retreating to safer quarters. Gidari Teli has gone in the gloaming or in the darker night to fill his _lota_ at the village well hard by, and returns only to tell his child-wife to run for the _byd_ (native doctor), who will apply his nostrums, and the Brahmin to sing his incantations and perform sundry mystical rites whilst he, poor Gidari, passes away to the happy land. But even of white men there are few indeed who, after some years in the Indian plains, return home without a lively recollection of one or more escapes, for which at the moment they were thankful to Providence.