still, I should not like to be one. If I were
a rattle-snake now, there would be no such thing as being genial with
men--men would be afraid of me, and then I should be a very lonesome and
miserable rattle-snake."

"True, men would be afraid of you. And why? Because of your rattle, your
hollow rattle--a sound, as I have been told, like the shaking together
of small, dry skulls in a tune of the Waltz of Death. And here we have
another beautiful truth. When any creature is by its make inimical to
other creatures, nature in effect labels that creature, much as an
apothecary does a poison. So that whoever is destroyed by a
rattle-snake, or other harmful agent, it is his own fault. He should
have respected the label. Hence that significant passage in Scripture,
'Who will pity the charmer that is bitten with a serpent?'"

"_I_ would pity him," said the cosmopolitan, a little bluntly, perhaps.

"But don't you think," rejoined the other, still maintaining his
passionless air, "don't you think, that for a man to pity where nature
is pitiless, is a little presuming?"

"Let casuists decide the casuistry, but the compassion the heart decides
for itself. But, sir," deepening in seriousness, "as I now for the first
realize, you but a moment since introduced the word irresponsible in a
way I am not used to. Now, sir, though, out of a tolerant spirit, as I
hope, I try my best never to be frightened at any speculation, so long
as it is pursued in honesty, yet, for once, I must acknowledge that you
do really, in the point cited, cause me uneasiness; because a proper
view of the universe, that view which is suited to breed a proper
confidence, teaches, if I err not, that since all things are justly
presided over, not very many living agents but must be some way
accountable."

"Is a rattle-snake accountable?" asked the stranger with such a
preternaturally cold, gemmy glance out of his pellucid blue eye, that he
seemed more a metaphysical merman than a feeling man; "is a rattle-snake
accountable?"

"If I will not affirm that it is," returned the other, with the caution
of no inexperienced thinker, "neither will I deny it. But if we suppose
it so, I need not say that such accountability is neither to you, nor
me, nor the Court of Common Pleas, but to something superior."

He was proceeding, when the stranger would have interrupted him; but as
reading his argument in his eye, the cosmopolitan, without waiting for
it to be put into wor