“No one spoke.  She stood swaying from side to side, her beautiful figure pliant as grass.

“Finally, with a long moan, she threw herself at the chief’s feet.  He regarded her impassively, and she gathered herself into a sitting posture, rocking to and fro, her head buried in her arms.”

“And you made no remonstrance?” I said.

“The poison had already been administered, my dear Lewis,” said Hilyard.  “And beside, it was in the interest of science.  It really seemed a shame to pick out such a beautiful creature; they are so rare in those tribes,” he continued, regretfully.

“Well, we sat there, perfectly mute, for about half an hour, I suppose.  The chief was almost as impassive as an Englishman.  I have seen the Almehs in Cairo, but I have never seen real poetry of motion—­mind more completely expressed by matter—­than that woman’s body translating the anguish she endured; languor turning to deep weariness, weariness to agony, agony to despair.  There was not a note in the gamut of mental suffering that she left unstruck—­that savage, whom one would not guess possessed a mind.  There came a pause.  She looked about with a wild, fixed purpose in her eyes; like a panther she leaped on me with her sinuous body, in a second she had snatched the knife from my belt, and had fallen on the earthen floor, her head almost severed from the trunk by the violence of the blow she had struck at her throat with the keen blade.  The chief made a sign to the guards who had brought her in (one of whom, by the way, was her deceived husband) to remove the body, and then he inquired, with some satisfaction, if I believed in the drug.

“I was about to leave on the morrow for the coast, and I begged with all humility for the formula, or what answered for it, of the medicine-man, who shook his head decidedly.

“From a corner of the tent he produced a small wicker cage, in the bottom of which lay coiled a snake of a bright orange yellow color, whose very triangular head showed it to be an especially venomous variety of the naja species.

“Muttering a few words and crooning to it after the manner of snake-charmers, it presently became lethargic, and he seized it by the neck and poured a few drops from an earthen bottle down its throat; then he dropped its tawny coils into its cage again, and placed the cage in front of me.  Soon the serpent roused.  It glided frantically about its cage; like a trail of molten gold was its color.  Suddenly it coiled upon itself in a spiral, and stung itself to death!

“After the most profound praise and flattery, and the present of a little glass medicine dropper which I chanced to have with me, and a small quantity of arsenic, which he tested with very satisfactory results, on a dog, he gave me a portion of the drug, but I’m sorry to say I could not prevail on the old scoundrel to give or sell the secret of its composition,” concluded Hilyard regretfully, lifting the phial with tenderness.  “I’ve tried to analyze it myself, and I sent it to a celebrated chemist, but the ingredients completely defy classification, and tests seem powerless to determine anything except that they are purely vegetable,” he said, shaking the liquid angrily, and then rising to lock it in his cabinet.