g moan, she threw herself at the chief's feet. He
regarded her impassively, and she gathered herself into a sitting
posture, rocking to and fro, her head buried in her arms."

"And you made no remonstrance?" I said.

"The poison had already been administered, my dear Lewis," said Hilyard.
"And beside, it was in the interest of science. It really seemed a
shame to pick out such a beautiful creature; they are so rare in those
tribes," he continued, regretfully.

"Well, we sat there, perfectly mute, for about half an hour, I suppose.
The chief was almost as impassive as an Englishman. I have seen the
Almehs in Cairo, but I have never seen real poetry of motion--mind more
completely expressed by matter--than that woman's body translating the
anguish she endured; languor turning to deep weariness, weariness to
agony, agony to despair. There was not a note in the gamut of mental
suffering that she left unstruck--that savage, whom one would not guess
possessed a mind. There came a pause. She looked about with a wild,
fixed purpose in her eyes; like a panther she leaped on me with her
sinuous body, in a second she had snatched the knife from my belt, and
had fallen on the earthen floor, her head almost severed from the trunk
by the violence of the blow she had struck at her throat with the keen
blade. The chief made a sign to the guards who had brought her in (one
of whom, by the way, was her deceived husband) to remove the body, and
then he inquired, with some satisfaction, if I believed in the drug.

"I was about to leave on the morrow for the coast, and I begged with all
humility for the formula, or what answered for it, of the medicine-man,
who shook his head decidedly.

"From a corner of the tent he produced a small wicker cage, in the
bottom of which lay coiled a snake of a bright orange yellow color,
whose very triangular head showed it to be an especially venomous
variety of the _naja_ species.

"Muttering a few words and crooning to it after the manner of
snake-charmers, it presently became lethargic, and he seized it by the
neck and poured a few drops from an earthen bottle down its throat; then
he dropped its tawny coils into its cage again, and placed the cage in
front of me. Soon the serpent roused. It glided frantically about its
cage; like a trail of molten gold was its color. Suddenly it coiled upon
itself in a spiral, and _stung itself to death_!

"After the most profound praise and flattery, and the pre