ty nails. Pretending to look earnestly at
this respectable person's stomach, Roderick assured him that his snake
was a copper-head and had been generated by the immense quantities of
that base metal with which he daily defiled his fingers. Again, he
assaulted a man of rubicund visage, and told him that few bosom
serpents had more of the devil in them than those that breed in the
vats of a distillery. The next whom Roderick honored with his attention
was a distinguished clergyman, who happened just then to be engaged in
a theological controversy, where human wrath was more perceptible than
divine inspiration.

"You have swallowed a snake in a cup of sacramental wine," quoth he.

"Profane wretch!" exclaimed the divine; but, nevertheless, his hand
stole to his breast.

He met a person of sickly sensibility, who, on some early
disappointment, had retired from the world, and thereafter held no
intercourse with his fellow-men, but brooded sullenly or passionately
over the irrevocable past. This man's very heart, if Roderick might be
believed, had been changed into a serpent, which would finally torment
both him and itself to death. Observing a married couple, whose
domestic troubles were matter of notoriety, he condoled with both on
having mutually taken a house adder to their bosoms. To an envious
author, who depreciated works which he could never equal, he said that
his snake was the slimiest and filthiest of all the reptile tribe, but
was fortunately without a sting. A man of impure life, and a brazen
face, asking Roderick if there were any serpent in his breast, he told
him that there was, and of the same species that once tortured Don
Rodrigo, the Goth. He took a fair young girl by the hand, and gazing
sadly into her eyes, warned her that she cherished a serpent of the
deadliest kind within her gentle breast; and the world found the truth
of those ominous words, when, a few months afterwards, the poor girl
died of love and shame. Two ladies, rivals in fashionable life who
tormented one another with a thousand little stings of womanish spite,
were given to understand that each of their hearts was a nest of
diminutive snakes, which did quite as much mischief as one great one.

But nothing seemed to please Roderick better than to lay hold of a
person infected with jealousy, which he represented as an enormous
green reptile, with an ice-cold length of body, and the sharpest sting
of any snake save one.

"And what one i