One bright Fall day, when the Deacon was walking through the Truro Hills, he came to his favorite place of meditation, a rocky, cave-like shelter which was close to the ocean bluffs. There he sat for some time, quietly smoking and thinking, when his thoughts were arrested by a strange and ominous hissing.
The Deacon was trapped, for there directly before the mouth of the cave, was a huge circle of deadly black snakes. The Deacon was unarmed, and the snakes he knew, would close in on him faster than light at his slightest movement. He sat frozen with horror.
The minutes dragged by. The Deacon never took his eyes off the snakes, and they in turn were like frozen black ribbons, heads slightly raised, as they stared at him with eyes he could not see. The small gusts of occasional sea breeze were cold against the Deacon’s skin, for he was drenched with the sweat of fear.
The snakes crawled slowly towards him, with one of the black lines a little ahead of the others. When the reptiles reached his feet, they stopped once more. He could hear their soft hissing, and feel the weight of the lead snake across his foot. They moved again, like a soft, clinging wave, slithering and undulating towards him. Sluggishly and relentlessly they moved up his immobile form, until they had twined their dank bodies all around him. They clung to him like tenacious pieces of damp wool. The Deacon could see their wicked slit eyes, bright and expressionless, but deadly; he could hear their hissing breaths, and feel their hungry bodies in a horrid caress. Still he did not move a hair, a muscle—he seemed not to breathe. The leader snake was wound around his neck, and was looking, his head raised, right at the Deacon, darting its flat head in and out at the Indian’s face.
On one of these thrusts, when the snake’s head came within an inch of his mouth, the Deacon opened wide his great jaws, and at the moment when the snake thrust its head inquiringly inside, the Deacon clamped shut his huge teeth, and bit the snake’s head off. This so frightened the rest of the snakes that they hurtled themselves from the Deacon’s body and fled. Some of the black reptiles were stunned from their fall, and the Deacon, master of the field, quickly killed them with a huge stone. The dead snakes he skinned, and brought their dried hides home as evidence of the terrible encounter.
... Johnny Blunt’s Courtship
After the sleigh ride last winter and the slippery tricks served by Patty Bean, nobody would suspect Johnny Blunt hankering after women again in a hurry. To hear him rave and take on, and rail out against the whole feminine gender, you would have taken it for granted that he would never look at one again, to all eternity.
Johnny did take an oath and swore if he ever meddled, or had any dealings with women again—in the sparking line, he meant—he might be hung or choked. But swearing off women, and then going into a meeting house chock full of gals, all shining and glistening in their Sunday clothes and clean faces, is like swearing off liquor and going into a grog shop—it’s all smoke.
Johnny held out pretty well for three whole Sundays but on the fourth there were strong symptoms of a change. A chap looking very much like Johnny, was seen on his way to the meeting house, with a new patent hat on, his head hung by the ears upon a shirt-collar, his cravat had a pudding in it, and branched out in front into a double-bow-knot. He carried a straight back, and a stiff neck, as a man ought to when he has his best clothes on, and every time he spit, he sprung his body forward like a jack-in-the-box, in order to shoot clear of the ruffles.