interest.
What did the Creator mean to signify, when he made such shapes of
horror, and, as if he had doubly cursed this envenomed wretch, had set
a mark upon him and sent him forth the Cain of the brotherhood of
serpents? It was a very curious fact that the first train of thoughts
Mr. Bernard's small menagerie suggested to him was the grave, though
somewhat worn, subject of the origin of evil. There is now to be seen in
a tall glass jar, in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Cantabridge in
the territory of the Massachusetts, a huge crotalus, of a species which
grows to more frightful dimensions than our own, under the hotter skies
of South America. Look at it, ye who would know what is the tolerance,
the freedom from prejudice, which can suffer such an incarnation of all
that is devilish to lie unharmed in the cradle of Nature! Learn, too,
that there are many things in this world which we are warned to shun,
and are even suffered to slay, if need be, but which we must not hate,
unless we would hate what God loves and cares for.

Whatever fascination the creature might exercise in his native haunts,
Mr. Bernard found himself not in the least nervous or affected in any
way while looking at his caged reptiles. When their cage was shaken,
they would lift their heads and spring their rattles; but the sound was
by no means so formidable to listen to as when it reverberated among
the chasms of the echoing rocks. The expression of the creatures was
watchful, still, grave, passionless, fate-like, suggesting a cold
malignity which seemed to be waiting for its opportunity. Their awful,
deep-cut mouths were sternly closed over the long hollow fangs which
rested their roots against the swollen poison-gland, where the venom had
been hoarding up ever since the last stroke had emptied it. They never
winked, for ophidians have no movable eyelids, but kept up that awful
fixed stare which made the two unwinking gladiators the survivors of
twenty pairs matched by one of the Roman Emperors, as Pliny tells us, in
his "Natural History." Their eyes did not flash, but shone with a cold
still light. They were of a pale-golden or straw color, horrible to look
into, with their stony calmness, their pitiless indifference, hardly
enlivened by the almost imperceptible vertical slit of the pupil,
through which Death seemed to be looking out like the archer behind the
long narrow loop-hole in a blank turret-wall. On the whole, the caged
reptiles, h