"You will not go without looking in at the serpents," said she, with a slight smile.
He hesitated for a second.
"No," said he; "I think I will not go in to see them."
"But you must," said she, cruelly. "You will see they are not such terrible creatures when they are shut up in glass boxes."
He suffered himself to be led along to the reptile house; but he was silent. He entered the last of the three. He stood in the middle of the room, and looked around him in rather a strange way.
"Now, come and look at this splendid fellow," said Miss White, who, with her sister, was leaning over the rail. "Look at his splendid bars of color! Do you see the beautiful blue sheen on its scales?"
It was a huge anaconda, its body as thick as a man's leg, lying coiled up in a circle; its flat, ugly head reposing in the middle. He came a bit nearer. "Hideous!" was all he said. And then his eyes was fixed on the eyes of the animal—the lidless eyes, with their perpetual glassy stare. He had thought at first they were closed; but now he saw that that opaque yellow substance was covered by a glassy coating, while in the centre there was a small slit as if cut by a penknife. The great coils slowly expanded and fell again as the animal breathed; otherwise the fixed stare of those yellow eyes might have been taken for the stare of death.
"I don't think the anaconda is poisonous at all," said she, lightly.
"But if you were to meet that beast in a jungle," said he, "what difference would that make!"
He spoke reproachfully, as if she were luring him into some secret place to have him slain with poisonous fangs. He passed on from that case to the others unwillingly. The room was still. Most of the snakes would have seemed dead but for the malign stare of the beaded eyes. He seemed anxious to get out; the atmosphere of the place was hot and oppressive.