talk to you with an old man's privilege, as an adviser. You have come to
this country-town without suspicion, and you are moving in the midst of
perils. There is a mystery which I must not tell you now; but I may warn
you. Keep your eyes open and your heart shut. If, through pitying that
girl, you ever come to love her, you are lost. If you deal carelessly
with her, beware! This is not all. There are other eyes on you beside
Elsie Venner's.--Do you go armed?"

"I do!" said Mr. Bernard,--and he 'put his hands up' in the shape of
fists, in such a way as to show that he was master of the natural
weapons at any rate.

The Doctor could not help smiling. But his face fell in an instant.

"You may want something more than those tools to work with. Come with me
into my sanctum."

The Doctor led Mr. Bernard into a small room opening out of the study.
It was a place such as anybody but a medical man would shiver to enter.
There was the usual tall box with its bleached rattling tenant; there
were jars in rows where "interesting cases" outlived the grief of widows
and heirs in alcoholic immortality,--for your "preparation-jar" is the
true "_monumentum aere perennius_"; there were various semipossibilities
of minute dimensions and unpromising developments; there were shining
instruments of evil aspect, and grim plates on the walls, and on one
shelf by itself, accursed and apart, coiled in a long cylinder of
spirit, a huge _crotalus_, rough-scaled, flat-headed, variegated with
dull bands, one of which partially encircled the neck like a collar,--an
awful wretch to look upon, with murder written all over him in horrid
hieroglyphics. Mr. Bernard's look was riveted on this creature,--not
fascinated certainly, for its eyes looked like white beads, being
clouded by the action of the spirits in which it had been long
kept,--but fixed by some indefinite sense of the renewal of a previous
impression;--everybody knows the feeling, with its suggestion of some
past state of existence. There was a scrap of paper on the jar with
something written on it. He was reaching up to read it when the Doctor
touched him lightly.

"Look here, Mr. Langdon!" he said, with a certain vivacity of manner, as
if wishing to call away his attention,--"this is my armory."

The Doctor threw open the door of a small cabinet, where were disposed
in artistic patterns various weapons of offence and defence,--for he was
a virtuoso in his way, and by the side of the i