its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively confined to the walls
[23] of Etruscan tombs. The function of the conscience, not always
as the prompter of gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as
his accuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a large part in
it; and the sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his
footsteps, made him oddly suspicious of particular places and
persons. Though his liking for animals was so strong, yet one fierce
day in early summer, as he walked along a narrow road, he had seen
the snakes breeding, and ever afterwards avoided that place and its
ugly associations, for there was something in the incident which made
food distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days afterwards. The
memory of it however had almost passed away, when at the corner of a
street in Pisa, he came upon an African showman exhibiting a great
serpent: once more, as the reptile writhed, the former painful
impression revived: it was like a peep into the lower side of the
real world, and again for many days took all sweetness from food and
sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the
secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread of a snake's
bite, like one of his companions, who had put his hand into the mouth
of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A kind of
pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly have killed
or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by the very
circumstance of their life, being what they [24] were. It was
something like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moral
feeling, for the face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur or
feathers, so different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity
of aspect in its spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a
humanity, dusty and sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the
sluggish coil, as it awoke suddenly into one metallic spring of pure
enmity against him. Long afterwards, when it happened that at Rome