A PLAGUE OF SNAKES.

Hokitika Guardian, 19 November 1918, Page 1

A PLAGUE OF SNAKES.

Sydney, Nov 6

Superstitious people say that, before the world comes to ah end, we are to have a plague of snakes and a plague of frogs. If this is so, the people of Temora district are ready to undergo preparations for the Great Dissolution. There are more snakes in this portion of Ane country side than has ever been known in history. They are causing alarm and intense discomfort everywhere, owing to their invasion of the houses.

A man over eighty years okl was walking in a street in Temora, in front of the principal church, when he met a great brown snake, six feet long. He w s armed with a riding whip, and he attacked it. The reptile was not easily despatched, and showed fight, but the octogenarian won, and exhibited the body of his victim as proof of a merrv battle.

Two lads, aged ii and 13, on the same day, encountered two reptiles, smaller in size, near the Temora Cemetery. Morrissey, the famous snake antidote man, spent a lot of time in Temora last year, and the boys had often watched him in his encounters with reptiles. They applied the knowledge thus gained, and were able to march home triumphantly, carrying the two snakes, now thoroughly dead, in a kerosene tin.

The position -is positively alarming in the Lake Cowall district. So bad is the plague there that the shearers at Lake Cowall station left that shed on account of it. The men, every night, found snakes in their beds and sleeping huts in such numbers that the thing got on their nerves, and they packed their swags and left in a body.