After this Mahomet took me to a number of Rhagarin. They all resembled
the one whom I had seen, and all were sellers of small articles and
fortune-tellers. They all differed slightly from common Egyptians in
appearance, and were more unlike them in not being importunate for money,
nor disagreeable in their manners. But though they were as certainly
gypsies as old Charlotte Cooper herself, none of them could speak Romany.
I used to amuse myself by imagining what some of my English gypsy friends
would have done if turned loose in Cairo among their cousins. How
naturally old Charlotte would have waylaid and "dukkered" and amazed the
English ladies in the Muskee, and how easily that reprobate old amiable
cosmopolite, the Windsor Frog, would have mingled with the motley mob of
donkey-boys and tourists before Shepherd's Hotel, and appointed himself
an _attache_ to their excursions to the Pyramids, and drunk their pale
ale or anything else to their healths, and then at the end of the day
have claimed a wage for his politeness! And how well the climate would
have agreed with them, and how they would have agreed that it was of all
lands the best for _tannin_, or tenting out, in the world!

The gypsiest-looking gypsy in Cairo, with whom I became somewhat
familiar, was a boy of sixteen, a snake-charmer; a dark and even handsome
youth, but with eyes of such wild wickedness that no one who had ever
seen him excited could hope that he would ever become as other human
beings. I believe that he had come, as do all of his calling, from a
snake-catching line of ancestors, and that he had taken in from them, as
did Elsie Venner, the serpent nature. They had gone snaking, generation
after generation, from the days of the serpent worship of old, it may be
back to the old Serpent himself; and this tawny, sinuous, active thing of
evil, this boy, without the least sense of sympathy for any pain, who
devoured a cobra alive with as much indifference as he had just shown in
petting it, was the result. He was a human snake. I had long before
reading the wonderfully original work of Doctor Holmes reflected deeply
on the moral and immoral influences which serpent worship of old, in
Syria and other lands, must have had upon its followers. But Elsie
Venner sets forth the serpent nature as benumbed or suspended by cold New
England winters and New England religions, moral and social influences;
the Ophites of old and the Cairene gypsy showed