ed his hands with a more convulsive force upon his breast, "I feel
him still. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!"

From this time the miserable sufferer ceased to shun the world, but
rather solicited and forced himself upon the notice of acquaintances
and strangers. It was partly the result of desperation on finding that
the cavern of his own bosom had not proved deep and dark enough to hide
the secret, even while it was so secure a fortress for the loathsome
fiend that had crept into it. But still more, this craving for
notoriety was a symptom of the intense morbidness which now pervaded
his nature. All persons chronically diseased are egotists, whether the
disease be of the mind or body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely
the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or mischief among the
cords of mortal life. Such individuals are made acutely conscious of a
self, by the torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to be
so prominent an object with them that they cannot but present it to the
face of every casual passer-by. There is a pleasure--perhaps the
greatest of which the sufferer is susceptible--in displaying the wasted
or ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast; and the fouler the
crime, with so much the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it
from thrusting up its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is
that cancer, or that crime, which constitutes their respective
individuality. Roderick Elliston, who, a little while before, had held
himself so scornfully above the common lot of men, now paid full
allegiance to this humiliating law. The snake in his bosom seemed the
symbol of a monstrous egotism to which everything was referred, and
which he pampered, night and day, with a continual and exclusive
sacrifice of devil worship.

He soon exhibited what most people considered indubitable tokens of
insanity. In some of his moods, strange to say, he prided and gloried
himself on being marked out from the ordinary experience of mankind, by
the possession of a double nature, and a life within a life. He
appeared to imagine that the snake was a divinity,--not celestial, it
is true, but darkly infernal,--and that he thence derived an eminence
and a sanctity, horrid, indeed, yet more desirable than whatever
ambition aims at. Thus he drew his misery around him like a regal
mantle, and looked down triumphantly upon those whose vitals nourished
no deadly monster. Oftener, however, his human nature as