Barry Pain

“ He found that when he wagged the tip of his tail, he wagged the object. He bit it gently, and found that he was biting himself. "Yes," he said, "this is the tip of my tail—and the beginning of the end." That, after all, was only what the most normal snake would have expected the tip of its tail to be. Yet, as he turned away, he thought, bitterly: "It has come to this—that I am a stranger to myself."
Needless to say, his satisfied ambition brought him no longer the least feeling of pride. Pity and ridicule were his portion now. And he cost so much to keep up that sometimes he almost despaired. ”

“ The snake felt all the poignant and serious displeasure of one who has answered a runaway knock.
It was late in the day; in the course of his journey he had got hopelessly entangled with a virgin forest, and saw no way to put an end to the intrigue; tired and humiliated he fell asleep.
He laid the blame for his failure upon a totally wrong cause. This tendency to blame the wrong thing is not uncommon. For instance, a piece of orange-peel, lying on the pavement, trips you up. You fall and hurt yourself. ”

“ He could trace the body of the snake stretching far down a valley, passing out of sight, and then reappearing on the further side of a hill. Further than this his unassisted vision would not take him, but he concluded that the snake's head was quite far enough away to make it a safe thing to bite the tip of the snake's tail, and this, descending from the eminence, he forthwith did. He bit it hard—less from cruelty than from a natural curiosity—and to prevent the snake from being in any uncertainty as to what precisely was happening, he bit it twice. He then ran away. ”