Johnson was born under a full moon on Salisbury Plain. Legend has it that his future greatness was foreshadowed when, as an infant, he was attacked by snakes, which he defeated by shooting them all to bits with a tiny little automatic flintlock pistol. Once he had defeated all of the snakes on the plain, he went to school at Stourbridge, where he met his future lifelong rival, Dr. Samuel "No L." Johnson. This is typified by an incident described both in Boswell's Life of Johnson. According to Boswell, L accused L-less of being fat, to which Johnson replied,