Uncle Dick and Lisa's Old Time Animal Tales

The Secretary of the Treasury on Wednesday week received from San Francisco, California, a box of dead snakes, bugs, flies, and centipedes, a grim looking collection of Chinese reptiles which had been consigned to a firm in that city, by the firm of Yo Chy Tong & Co., of Canton, to be used by the Chinese residents of San Francisco for medicinal purposes. The manifest describes them as drugs and medicines. The snakes are neatly coiled up and skewered together, with the heads sticking up in the centre of the coil and presenting a devilish look. They are apparently about five feet in length, and bear a resemblance to the ordinary stripped snake of New England, except that the head is longer and armed with a very sharp set of ugly looking teeth which the New York reptile has not. The centipedes are six or seven inches long, the body black, and the legs of a dirty yellow color. The bugs and flies are, in size and appearance, such as might be expected to come from John Chinaman’s country, namely-anything but graceful or inviting in appearance. Altogether, the “medicine” is unsavory enough in appearance, however well it might taste when properly compounded by a Chinese doctor. At any rate, the Appraiser at the San Francisco Custom House thought so little of the contents of the box that he refused to pass it through the Custom House, on the ground that the articles were deadly poisons, and so it comes all the way to Washington for a decision of the Secretary of the Treasury.