ed by objects perfectly harmless and not in themselves
offensive to any sense.

"Lord bless you," said the woman, "rattlers never touches our folks. I'd
jest 'z lieves handle them creaturs as so many striped snakes."

So saying, she put their heads down with her hand, and packed them
together in her apron as if they had been bits of cart-rope.

Mr. Bernard had never heard of the power, or, at least, the belief in
the possession of a power by certain persons, which enables them to
handle these frightful reptiles with perfect impunity. The fact,
however, is well known to others, and more especially to a very
distinguished Professor in one of the leading institutions of the great
city of the land, whose experiences in the neighborhood of Graylock, as
he will doubtless inform the curious, were very much like those of the
young master.

Mr. Bernard had a wired cage ready for his formidable captives, and
studied their habits and expression with a strange sort of 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,