the boy as warmed to life
in lands whose winters are as burning summers. Elsie Venner is not
sensual, and sensuality is the leading trait of the human-serpent nature.
Herein lies an error, just as a sculptor would err who should present
Lady Godiva as fully draped, or Sappho merely as a sweet singer of
Lesbos, or Antinous only as a fine young man. He who would harrow hell
and rake out the devil, and then exhibit to us an ordinary sinner, or an
_opera bouffe_ "Mefistofele," as the result, reminds one of the seven
Suabians who went to hunt a monster,--"_a Ungeheuer_,"--and returned with
a hare. Elsie Venner is not a hare; she is a wonderful creation; but she
is a winter-snake. I confess that I have no patience, however, with
those who pretend to show us summer-snakes, and would fain dabble with
vice; who are amateurs in the diabolical, and drawing-room dilettanti in
damnation. Such, as I have said before, are the aesthetic adorers of
Villon, whom the old _roue_ himself would have most despised, and the
admirers of "Faustine," whom Faustina would have picked up between her
thumb and finger, and eyed with serene contempt before throwing them out
of the window. A future age will have for these would-be wickeds, who
are only monks half turned inside out, more laughter than we now indulge
in at Chloe and Strephon.

I always regarded my young friend Abdullah as a natural child of the
devil and a serpent-souled young sinner, and he never disappointed me in
my opinion of him. I never in my life felt any antipathy to serpents,
and he evidently regarded me as a _sapengro_, or snake-master. The first
day I met him he put into my hands a cobra which had the fangs extracted,
and then handled an asp which still had its poison teeth. On his asking
me if I was afraid of it, and my telling him "No," he gave it to me, and
after I had petted it, he always manifested an understanding,--I cannot
say sympathy. I should have liked to see that boy's sister, if he ever
had one, and was not hatched out from some egg found in the desert by an
Egyptian incubus or incubator. She must have been a charming young lady,
and his mother must have been a beauty, especially when in
court-dress,--with her broom _et praeterea nihil_. But neither, alas,
could be ever seen by me, for it is written in the "Gittin" that there
are three hundred species of male demons, but what the female herself is
like is known to no one.

Abdullah first made his app