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 is that?" asked a bystander, 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.
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