all the rest. Still the city
could not bear this new apostle. It was demanded by nearly all, and
particularly by the most respectable inhabitants, that Roderick should
no longer be permitted to violate the received rules of decorum by
obtruding his own bosom serpent to the public gaze, and dragging those
of decent people from their lurking places.

Accordingly, his relatives interfered and placed him in a private
asylum for the insane. When the news was noised abroad, it was observed
that many persons walked the streets with freer countenances and
covered their breasts less carefully with their hands.

His confinement, however, although it contributed not a little to the
peace of the town, operated unfavorably upon Roderick himself. In
solitude his melancholy grew more black and sullen. He spent whole
days--indeed, it was his sole occupation--in communing with the
serpent. A conversation was sustained, in which, as it seemed, the
hidden monster bore a part, though unintelligibly to the listeners, and
inaudible except in a hiss. Singular as it may appear, the sufferer had
now contracted a sort of affection for his tormentor, mingled, however,
with the intensest loathing and horror. Nor were such discordant
emotions incompatible. Each, on the contrary, imparted strength and
poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love--horrible antipathy--embracing
one another in his bosom, and both concentrating themselves upon a
being that had crept into his vitals or been engendered there, and
which was nourished with his food, and lived upon his life, and was as
intimate with him as his own heart, and yet was the foulest of all
created things! But not the less was it the true type of a morbid
nature.

Sometimes, in his moments of rage and bitter hatred against the snake
and himself, Roderick determined to be the death of him, even at the
expense of his own life. Once he attempted it by starvation; but, while
the wretched man was on the point of famishing, the monster seemed to
feed upon his heart, and to thrive and wax gamesome, as if it were his
sweetest and most congenial diet. Then he privily took a dose of active
poison, imagining that it would not fail to kill either himself or the
devil that possessed him, or both together. Another mistake; for if
Roderick had not yet been destroyed by his own poisoned heart nor the
snake by gnawing it, they had little to fear from arsenic or corrosive
sublimate. Indeed, the venomous pest appear