For my own part, I don't believe in a partial liar--this art does not deal in veneer; a liar is a liar right through.

Self-interest may prompt falsity of the tongue; but if one prove to be a liar, nothing that he says can ever be believed.
This leads us to the conclusion that because she said or inferred that there was no snake, we should look for one--and expect to find it, too.
"Now let me digress.

I live, and have for many years lived, in Derbyshire, a county more celebrated for its caves than any other county in England.

I have been through them all, and am familiar with every turn of them; as also with other great caves in Kentucky, in France, in Germany, and a host of other places--in many of these are tremendously deep caves of narrow aperture, which are valued by intrepid explorers, who descend narrow gullets of abysmal depth--and sometimes never return.
In many of the caverns in the Peak I am convinced that some of the smaller passages were used in primeval times as the lairs of some of the great serpents of legend and tradition.

It may have been that such caverns were formed in the usual geologic way--bubbles or flaws in the earth's crust--which were later used by the monsters of the period of the young world.