helpful recreation there
was no need of troubling herself with a story written with a different
end in view.

This story has called forth so many curious inquiries that it seems
worth while to answer the more important questions which have occurred
to its readers.

In the first place, it is not based on any well-ascertained
physiological fact. There are old fables about patients who have barked
like dogs or crowed like cocks, after being bitten or wounded by those
animals. There is nothing impossible in the idea that Romulus and Remus
may have imbibed wolfish traits of character from the wet nurse the
legend assigned them, but the legend is not sound history, and the
supposition is nothing more than a speculative fancy. Still, there is a
limbo of curious evidence bearing on the subject of pre-natal influences
sufficient to form the starting-point of an imaginative composition.

The real aim, of the story was to test the doctrine of "original sin"
and human responsibility for the disordered volition coming under that
technical denomination. Was Elsie Venner, poisoned by the venom of a
crotalus before she was born, morally responsible for the "volitional"
aberrations, which translated into acts become what is known as sin,
and, it may be, what is punished as crime? If, on presentation of the
evidence, she becomes by the verdict of the human conscience a proper
object of divine pity and not of divine wrath, as a subject of moral
poisoning, wherein lies the difference between her position at the bar
of judgment, human or divine, and that of the unfortunate victim who
received a moral poison from a remote ancestor before he drew his first
breath?

It might be supposed that the character of Elsie Veneer was suggested
by some of the fabulous personages of classical or mediaeval story. I
remember that a French critic spoke of her as cette pauvre Melusine. I
ought to have been ashamed, perhaps, but I had, not the slightest idea
who Melusina was until I hunted up the story, and found that she was a
fairy, who for some offence was changed every Saturday to a serpent from
her waist downward. I was of course familiar with Keats's Lamia, another
imaginary being, the subject of magical transformation into a serpent.
My story was well advanced before Hawthorne's wonderful "Marble Faun,"
which might be thought to have furnished me with the hint of a mixed
nature,--human, with an alien element,--was published or known to me. So
tha