horror, and,
as if he had doubly cursed this envenomed wretch, had set a mark upon him
and sent him forth the Cain of the brotherhood of serpents? It was a
very curious fact that the first train of thoughts Mr. Bernard's small
menagerie suggested to him was the grave, though somewhat worn, subject
of the origin of evil. There is now to be seen in a tall glass jar, in
the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Cantabridge in the territory of the
Massachusetts, a huge crotalus, of a species which grows to more
frightful dimensions than our own, under the hotter skies of South
America. Look at it, ye who would know what is the tolerance, the
freedom from prejudice, which can suffer such an incarnation of all that
is devilish to lie unharmed in the cradle of Nature! Learn, too, that
there are many things in this world which we are warned to shun, and are
even suffered to slay, if need be, but which we must not hate, unless we
would hate what God loves and cares for.

Whatever fascination the creature might exercise in his native haunts,
Mr. Bernard found himself not in the least nervous or affected in any way
while looking at his caged reptiles. When their cage was shaken, they
would lift their heads and spring their rattles; but the sound was by no
means so formidable to listen to as when it reverberated among the chasms
of the echoing rocks. The expression of the creatures was watchful,
still, grave, passionless, fate-like, suggesting a cold malignity which
seemed to be waiting for its opportunity. Their awful, deep-cut mouths
were sternly closed over the long hollow fangs which rested their roots
against the swollen poison-gland, where the venom had been hoarding up
ever since the last stroke had emptied it. They never winked, for
ophidians have no movable eyelids, but kept up that awful fixed stare
which made the two unwinking gladiators the survivors of twenty pairs
matched by one of the Roman Emperors, as Pliny tells us, in his "Natural
History." Their eyes did not flash, but shone with a cold still light.
They were of a pale-golden or straw color, horrible to look into, with
their stony calmness, their pitiless indifference, hardly enlivened by
the almost imperceptible vertical slit of the pupil, through which Death
seemed to be looking out like the archer behind the long narrow loop-hole
in a blank turret-wall. On the whole, the caged reptiles, horrid as they
were, hardly matched his recollections of what he had