The Adder's Siesta by Grant Allen — Read

TWO "hedgers and tiners," demolishing a bank of earth at Turner's Corner as I walked along the Headley Road this morning, came, to their great surprise and no little horror, on a coiled and twisted colony of hibernating adders. I paused in my stroll for ten minutes to watch the unearthing. It was a curious sight; the lithe and sinuous creatures, recognizable at once as genuine vipers by the zigzag pattern of dark diamond-shaped spots down their glossy green backs, lay curled and entwined with one another in snaky amity, fast asleep past waking, and completely filling up, as with a living mass of inextricable knots, the curves and crannies of the underground hole where they had taken refuge. They were there, of course, for their little winter siesta, which occupies them for a trifle of six months at a sitting.

I pleaded hard for their lives with the men, explaining most earnestly that they would do much more good than harm, from the point of view of those whose talk is of beeves, and who regard standing corn as the one really sacred object in this beautiful universe. But I need hardly say my special pleading proved of no avail; the hedgers chopped them up fine before my eyes with their murderous spades, on the familiar antique principle of "larning them to be adders. " Poor helpless creatures, expiating thus unaware the _delicta majorum_! They would have killed more mice in a week than the men could catch in a summer; but they were snakes for all that, and your rustic hates and shrinks from snakes, _et dona ferentes_.