But the old Malee approaches with a meek salaam and a posy of jasmine and marigolds and warns him that there is a cobra in the shrine.

He, Beharilal, the Bunia, who had always removed the insects so tenderly from his own person that they were not hurt, who had never committed the sin of killing a mosquito or a fly; he, with his own hands, had taken the life of the guardian cobra of the shrine!

But some of them, the cobras for instance, develop into what are on the whole perhaps the most formidable of all snakes.

Where the Tagus joins the Hooghly I have bowled the wily googly, I have heard the howdah's howl at Hyderabad; On a rickshaw I've gone sailing, with my boomerang impaling Hooded cobras on the ice-floes off Bagdad.

A tiger with his claws cut and his teeth drawnan old, grey-bearded tiger, ghastly and grim, but harmlessa cobra with the poison-bag plucked out of his jaw!