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against the wires, and hissed and sissed as if it would have stung us all to death in an instant. It was however, a very beautiful creature of the kind, and as the sun then shone very bright, the golden and silver streaks upon its azure skin made a very splendid appearance. My youngest son wanting to go and stroke it;--"No, my pretty boy, said the good Bramin; if you have any value for yourself, you will always keep out of the reach of such creatures as these, and of all such who resemble the young lady by whose soul this serpent is animated. I say _young lady_, because the serpent before you is indeed animated by the soul of the late Miss _Abigail Eviltongue_. The family of the _Eviltongue_, (I dare say you have heard of them) is extremely numerous; for there are some, and indeed too many of them, in every town, and, I believe in every village in the country. Miss _Abigail_, the young lady I am speaking of, had as just a title to the name, and supported the character of her family with as much exactness as any one amongst them; for her tongue was remarkably active, and spared the reputation neither of friend nor foe. She was, it is true, a very handsome girl, and the charms of her person would have procured her many admirers if they had not been disgraced by her natural propensity to slander and defamation. In her very infancy, as soon as she could speak to be understood, she began with telling fibs of the servants, and very frequently of her brothers and sisters; for which, you may be certain, they all despised her very heartily. But as she was too much encouraged in this hateful practice by her parents, instead of being severely flogged for it, as she ought to have been, she set the frowns and sneers of the others at open defiance; and the more they resented her little malice the more eager she was to gratify it by loading them with all the falsehoods she was capable of inventing. In proportion as she grew older, this mischievous habit increased upon her; and when she was big enough to go a visiting, she indulged it abroad with as much freedom as she had been used to do at home; so that, in a short time, there was scarcely a young miss or master in the neighbourhood whose character she had not attempted to injure. What made her slanders the more odious was, that she generally vented them under a pretence of the greatest friendship and respect for the persons to whom she related them, and with great seeming pity for t
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