grave, passionless, fate-like, suggesting a cold
malignity that seemed to be waiting for its opportunity. Their awful,
deep-cut mouths were sternly closed over the long hollow fangs that
rested their roots against the swollen poison-bag, where the venom had
been boarding 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." But their eyes did not flash, as he had expected
to see them. 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. Possibly their pupils
might open wide enough in the dark hole of the rock to let the glare
of the back part of the eye show, as we often see it in cats and other
animals. On the whole, the caged reptiles, horrid as they were, were yet
very different from his recollections of what he had seen or dreamed
he saw at the cavern. These looked dangerous enough, but yet quiet. A
treacherous stillness, however,--as the unfortunate New York physician
found, when he put his foot out to wake up the torpid creature, and
instantly the fang flashed through his boot, carrying the poison into
his blood, and death with it.

Mr. Bernard kept these strange creatures, and watched all their habits
with a natural curiosity. In any collection of animals the venomous
beasts are looked at with the greatest interest, just as the greatest
villains are most run after by the unknown public. Nobody troubles
himself for a common striped snake or a petty thief, but a _cobra_ or a
wife-killer is a centre of attraction to all eyes. These captives did
very little to earn their living; but, on the other hand, their living
was not expensive, their diet being nothing but air, _au nature_. Months
and months these creatures will live and seem to thrive well enough,
as any showman who has them in his menagerie will testify, though they
never touch anything to eat or drink.

In the mean time Mr. Bernard had become very curious about a class of
subjects not treated of in any detail in those text-books accessible in
most country-towns, to