Quilt Notes: For illustrations of SNAKE'S TRAIL and numerous other "drunkard's path" type quilt designs, with full templates and cutting & piecing instructions, see: 65 DRUNKARD'S PATH QUILT DESIGNS, by Pepper Cory, Dover, 1991. The maze or labyrinth of SNAKE'S TRAIL, also called DRUNKARD'S TRAIL, is not the white line (which acts like a garden hedge), but the space in between the lines. This is one of the (secret) versions, which will repeat the maze across the quilt, endlessly. According to Pepper Cory: "The blocks, with their double circles in the opposing corners, could be arranged in many maze sets... the directions for setting the blocks in the maze were carefully hoarded and passed from quiltmaker to quiltmaker."

THE SNAKE
by Emily Dickinson

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him — did you not?
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun —
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.