Green GardenGrass snakes can be dangerous, Yes, grass snakes,
not rattlesnakes.

A couple in Sweetwater, Texas had a lot of potted plants, and
during a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing a lot of them
indoors to protect them from a possible freeze. It turned out that
a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of the plants
and when it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it
go under the sofa. She let out a very loud scream.

The husband who was taking a shower ran out into the living room
naked to see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake
under the sofa. He got down on the floor on his hands and knees
to look for it.

About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the
leg. He thought the snake had bitten him and he fainted. His wife
thought he had a heart attack, so she called an ambulance. The
attendants rushed in and loaded him on the stretcher and started
carrying him out.

About that time the snake came out from under the sofa and the
Emergency Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the
stretcher. That's when the man broke his leg and why he is in
the hospital.

The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she
called on a neighbor man. He volunteered to capture the snake.
He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under
the couch.

Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on
the sofa in relief. But in relaxing, her hand dangled in between
the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around. She
screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa, and
the neighbor man, seeing her laying there passed out tried to use
CPR to revive her.

The neighbor's wife, who had just returned from shopping at the
grocery store, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth and
slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned
goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it
needed stitches. An ambulance was again called and it was determined
that the injury required hospitalization.

The noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her
neighbor lying on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she
assumed he had been bitten by the snake. She went to the kitchen,
brought back a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down
the man's throat.

By now the police had arrived. They saw the unconscious man, smelled
the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred. They
were about to arrest them all, when the two women tried to explain
how it all happened over a little green snake.  They called an
ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.

Just then the little snake crawled out from under the couch. One of
the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and
hit the leg of the end table that was on one side of the sofa. The
table fell over and the lamp on it shattered and as the bulb broke,
it started a fire in the drapes.

The other policeman tried to beat out the flames and fell through
the window into the yard on top of the family dog, who startled,
jumped up and raced out into the street, where an oncoming car
swerved to avoid it and smashed into the parked police car and set
it on fire. Meanwhile the burning drapes had spread to the walls
and the entire house was blazing.

Neighbors had called the fire department and the arriving
fire-truck had started raising his ladder as they were halfway
down the street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires
and put out the electricity and disconnected the telephones in a
ten-square city block area.

Time passed.  Both men were discharged from the hospital, the
house was re-built, the police acquired a new car, and all was,
once again, right with their normal world.

About a year later they were watching TV and the weatherman
announced a cold snap for that night. The husband asked his wife
if she thought they should bring in their plants for the night.

She shot him.

------