Here Diavolo illustrated the process by whacking the Baron over his waist-coat with a small malacca stick he carried.
“Well, I didn’t like it,” said Angelica. “I don’t care for snakes, but somehow or other it seems to me we’d ought to have left him alone. He wasn’t hurting anybody off there. If he’d come walking on our place, that would have been one thing, but we went walking where he was, and he had as much right to take a sun-bath there as we had.”
“That’s true enough,” put in Mr. Munchausen, resolved after Diavolo’s whack, to side against him. “You’ve just about hit it, Angelica. It wasn’t polite of you in the first place, to disturb his snakeship in his nap, and having done so, I can’t see why Diavolo wanted to kill him.”
“Oh, pshaw!” said Diavolo, airily. “What’s snakes good for except to kill? I’ll kill ’em every chance I get. They aren’t any good.”
“All right,” said Mr. Munchausen, quietly. “I suppose you know all about it; but I know a thing or two about snakes myself that do not exactly agree with what you say. They are some good sometimes, and, as a matter of fact, as a general rule, they are less apt to attack you without reason than you are to attack them. A snake is rather inclined to mind its own business unless he finds it necessary to do otherwise. Occasionally too you’ll find a snake with a truly amiable character. I’ll never forget my old pet Wriggletto, for instance, and as long as I remember him I can’t help having a warm corner for snakes in my heart.”
Here Mr. Munchausen paused and puffed thoughtfully on his cigar as a far-away half-affectionate look came into his eye.
“Who was Wriggletto?” asked Diavolo, transferring a half dollar from Mr. Munchausen’s pocket to his own.
“Who was he?” cried Mr. Munchausen. “You don’t mean to say that I have never told you about Wriggletto, my pet boa-constrictor, do you?”
“You never told me,” said Angelica. “But I’m not everybody. Maybe you’ve told some other little Imps.”
“No, indeed!” said Mr. Munchausen. “You two are the only little Imps I tell stories to, and as far as I am concerned, while I admit you are not everybody you are somebody and that’s more than everybody is. Wriggletto was a boa-constrictor I once knew in South America, and he was without exception, the most remarkable bit of a serpent I ever met. Genial, kind, intelligent, grateful and useful, and, after I’d had him a year or two, wonderfully well educated. He could write with himself as well as you or I can with a pen. There’s a recommendation for you. Few men are all that—and few boa-constrictors either, as far as that goes. I admit Wriggletto was an exception to the general run of serpents, but he was all that I claim for him, nevertheless.”