A SNAKE came to my water-trough
** On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark
carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher 5
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was
at the trough before me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth wall in the
gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness, soft-bellied
down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a
small clearness, IQ
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack
long body.
Silently:
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting. 15
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and.
mused a moment,
r And stooped and drank a little more,
854