"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.