s that?" asked a by-stander, overhearing him.

It was a dark-browed man who put the question; he had an evasive eye,
which in the course of a dozen years had looked no mortal directly in
the face. There was an ambiguity about this person's character,--a
stain upon his reputation,--yet none could tell precisely of what
nature, although the city gossips, male and female, whispered the most
atrocious surmises. Until a recent period he had followed the sea, and
was, in fact, the very shipmaster whom George Herkimer had encountered,
under such singular circumstances, in the Grecian Archipelago.

"What bosom serpent has the sharpest sting?" repeated this man; but he
put the question as if by a reluctant necessity, and grew pale while he
was uttering it.

"Why need you ask?" replied Roderick, with a look of dark intelligence.
"Look into your own breast. Hark! my serpent bestirs himself! He
acknowledges the presence of a master fiend!"

And then, as the by-standers afterwards affirmed, a hissing sound was
heard, apparently in Roderick Elliston's breast. It was said, too, that
an answering hiss came from the vitals of the shipmaster, as if a snake
were actually lurking there and had been aroused by the call of its
brother reptile. If there were in fact any such sound, it might have
been caused by a malicious exercise of ventriloquism on the part of
Roderick.

Thus making his own actual serpent--if a serpent there actually was in
his bosom--the type of each man's fatal error, or hoarded sin, or
unquiet conscience, and striking his sting so unremorsefully into the
sorest spot, we may well imagine that Roderick became the pest of the
city. Nobody could elude him--none could withstand him. He grappled
with the ugliest truth that he could lay his hand on, and compelled his
adversary to do the same. Strange spectacle in human life where it is
the instinctive effort of one and all to hide those sad realities, and
leave them undisturbed beneath a heap of superficial topics which
constitute the materials of intercourse between man and man! It was not
to be tolerated that Roderick Elliston should break through the tacit
compact by which the world has done its best to secure repose without
relinquishing evil. The victims of his malicious remarks, it is true,
had brothers enough to keep them in countenance; for, by Roderick's
theory, every mortal bosom harbored either a brood of small serpents or
one overgrown monster that had devoured