A few days after this, a dark, gypsy-looking woman presented herself at his door.  She held up her apron as if it contained something precious in the bag she made with it.

“Y’ wanted some rattlers,” said the woman.  “Here they be.”

She opened her apron and showed a coil of rattlesnakes lying very peaceably in its fold.  They lifted their heads up, as if they wanted to see what was going on, but showed no sign of anger.

“Are you crazy?” said Mr. Bernard.  “You’re dead in an hour, if one of those creatures strikes you!”

He drew back a little, as he spoke; it might be simple disgust; it might be fear; it might be what we call antipathy, which is different from either, and which will sometimes show itself in paleness, and even faintness, produced by objects perfectly harmless and not in themselves offensive to any sense.

“Lord bless you,” said the woman, “rattlers never touches our folks.  I’d jest ’z lieves handle them creaturs as so many striped snakes.”

So saying, she put their heads down with her hand, and packed them together in her apron as if they had been bits of cart-rope.

Mr. Bernard had never heard of the power, or, at least, the belief in the possession of a power by certain persons, which enables them to handle these frightful reptiles with perfect impunity.  The fact, however, is well known to others, and more especially to a very distinguished Professor in one of the leading institutions of the great city of the land, whose experiences in the neighborhood of Graylock, as he will doubtless inform the curious, were very much like those of the young master.

Mr. Bernard had a wired cage ready for his formidable captives, and studied their habits and expression with a strange sort of interest.  What did the Creator mean to signify, when he made such shapes of horror, and, as if he had doubly cursed this envenomed wretch, had set a mark upon him and sent him forth the Cain of the brotherhood of serpents?  It was a very curious fact that the first train of thoughts Mr. Bernard’s small menagerie suggested to him was the grave, though somewhat worn, subject of the origin of evil.  There is now to be seen in a tall glass jar, in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Cantabridge in the territory of the Massachusetts, a huge crotalus, of a species which grows to more frightful dimensions than our own, under the hotter skies of South America.  Look at it, ye who would know what is the tolerance, the freedom from prejudice, which can suffer such an incarnation of all that is devilish to lie unharmed in the cradle of Nature!  Learn, too, that there are many things in this world which we are warned to shun, and are even suffered to slay, if need be, but which we must not hate, unless we would hate what God loves and cares for.