turned a sharp angle of the rock and found himself on
a natural platform, which lay in front of one of the wider
fissures,--whether the mouth of a cavern or not he could not yet tell.
A flat stone made an easy seat, upon which he sat down, as he was
very glad to do, and looked mechanically about him. A small fragment
splintered from the rock was at his feet. He took it and threw it down
the declivity a little below where he sat. He looked about for a stem
or a straw of some kind to bite upon,--a country-instinct,--relic, no
doubt, of the old vegetable-feeding habits of Eden. Is that a stem or a
straw? He picked it up. It was a hair-pin.

To say that Mr. Langdon had a strange sort of thrill shoot through him
at the sight of this harmless little implement would be a statement not
at variance with the fact of the case. That smooth stone had been often
trodden, and by what foot he could not doubt. He rose up from his seat
to look round for other signs of a woman's visits. What if there is a
cavern here, where she has a retreat, fitted up, perhaps, as anchorites
fitted their cells,--nay, it may be, carpeted and mirrored, and with one
of those tiger-skins for a couch, such as they, say the girl loves to
lie on? Let us look, at any rate.

Mr. Bernard walked to the mouth of the cavern or fissure and looked into
it. His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, small, sharp,
cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding with a smooth, steady
motion towards the light, and himself. He stood fixed, struck dumb,
staring back into them with dilating pupils and sudden numbness of fear
that cannot move, as in the terror of dreams. The two sparks of light
came forward until they grew to circles of flame, and all at once lifted
themselves up as if in angry surprise. Then for the first time thrilled
in Mr. Bernard's ears the dreadful sound that nothing which breathes, be
it man or brute, can hear unmoved,--the long, loud, stinging whirr,
as the huge, thick bodied reptile shook his many-jointed rattle and
adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke. His eyes were drawn as with
magnets toward the circles of flame. His ears rung as in the overture
to the swooning dream of chloroform. Nature was before man with her
anaesthetics: the cat's first shake stupefies the mouse; the lion's
first shake deadens the man's fear and feeling; and the crotalus
paralyzes before he strikes. He waited as in a trance,--waited as one
that longs to have the