companionship. Not merely the eye of man was a horror to him; not
merely the light of a friend's countenance; but even the blessed
sunshine, likewise, which in its universal beneficence typifies the
radiance of the Creator's face, expressing his love for all the
creatures of his hand. The dusky twilight was now too transparent for
Roderick Elliston; the blackest midnight was his chosen hour to steal
abroad; and if ever he were seen, it was when the watchman's lantern
gleamed upon his figure, gliding along the street, with his hands
clutched upon his bosom, still muttering, "It gnaws me! It gnaws me!"
What could it be that gnawed him?

After a time, it became known that Elliston was in the habit of
resorting to all the noted quacks that infested the city, or whom money
would tempt to journey thither from a distance. By one of these
persons, in the exultation of a supposed cure, it was proclaimed far
and wide, by dint of handbills and little pamphlets on dingy paper,
that a distinguished gentleman, Roderick Elliston, Esq., had been
relieved of a SNAKE in his stomach! So here was the monstrous secret,
ejected from its lurking place into public view, in all its horrible
deformity. The mystery was out; but not so the bosom serpent. He, if it
were anything but a delusion, still lay coiled in his living den. The
empiric's cure had been a sham, the effect, it was supposed, of some
stupefying drug which more nearly caused the death of the patient than
of the odious reptile that possessed him. When Roderick Elliston
regained entire sensibility, it was to find his misfortune the town
talk--the more than nine days' wonder and horror--while, at his bosom,
he felt the sickening motion of a thing alive, and the gnawing of that
restless fang which seemed to gratify at once a physical appetite and a
fiendish spite.

He summoned the old black servant, who had been bred up in his father's
house, and was a middle-aged man while Roderick lay in his cradle.

"Scipio!" he began; and then paused, with his arms folded over his
heart. "What do people say of me, Scipio."

"Sir! my poor master! that you had a serpent in your bosom," answered
the servant with hesitation.

"And what else?" asked Roderick, with a ghastly look at the man.

"Nothing else, dear master," replied Scipio, "only that the doctor gave
you a powder, and that the snake leaped out upon the floor."

"No, no!" muttered Roderick to himself, as he shook his head, and
press