ORIGINAL PASSAGE: (words: 335)

Snakes were common about us: snakes of seven or eight different kinds, green in the green grass, and yellow and dusky---mottled in the dry and barren places and in withered herbage, so that it was difficult to detect them. Sometimes they intruded into the dwelling rooms, and at all seasons a nest or colony of snakes existed in the thick old foundations of the house, and under the flooring. In winter they hibernated there, tangled together in a cluster no doubt, and in summer nights they were at home, coiled at their ease or gliding ghost-like about their subterranean apartments. I would lie awake and listen to them by the hour. For although it may be news to some closet ophiologists, serpents are not all so mute as we think them. At all events this kind, the philodryas aestivus—a beautiful and harmless colubrine snake, two and a half to three feet long, marked all over with inky black on a vivid green ground—not only emitted a sound when lying undisturbed in his den, but several individuals would hold a conversation together which seemed endless, for I generally fell asleep before it was finished: a hissing conversation it is true, but not unmodulated, or without considerable variety in it, a long sibilation would be followed by distinctly-heard ticking sounds, as of a husky-ticking clock, and after ten or twenty or thirty ticks another hiss, like a long expiring sigh, sometimes with a tremble in it as of a dry leaf swiftly vibrating in the wind. No sooner would one cease than another would begin; and so it would go on. It was dark in my room, and to my excited imagination, the serpents were no longer under the floor, but out, gliding hither and thither over it, with uplifted heads, in a kind of mystic dance; and I often shivered to think what my bare feet might touch if I were to thrust a leg out and let it hang over the bedside.

PRECIS:

There were different kinds of snakes around me. They were of variety of hue and forms. Some were green, plain and others were dark and spotted. They remained inactive and dormant during winter but moved about in summer. They not only give sounds but also make communications with one another through hushing sounds. As I lay awake in my dark room, I frequently tremble imagining them and I am scared to push my legs down my bed.

HEADING: MY FEAR FOR SNAKES