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Updated: May 20, 2025
Again they hailed, imploring to be picked up, stating, as far as could be understood, that they had broken adrift from astern of the Asp, with the gig, which was lost; and from the words which reached the Lark, Mr Kingston was very much afraid that several lives were already sacrificed, while it seemed too probable that those in the pinnace would share the same fate, unless he could manage to get near them to take them on board.
A contemptuous smile flitted over her beautiful lips as, with rapid movements, she flung handful after handful of figs on the table, till she saw some thing stirring under the fruit, and with a sigh of relief exclaimed under her breath: "There it is!" as with hasty resolution she held out her arm towards the asp, which hissed at her.
And, as if he could not make that calculation looking out into the mild freedom of the country night, he turned back and went up to the chimney-piece. There were his pet bronzes a Cleopatra with the asp at her breast; a Socrates; a greyhound playing with her puppy; a strong man reining in some horses. 'They last! he thought, and a pang went through his heart.
Freedom serves America much as Æsop's stork did the frogs: we are appallingly free to be devoured by envy, stabbed by calumny, strangled by slander. I believe if I were a painter, and desired to portray Cleopatra's death, I would assuredly give to the asp the baleful features and sneering smirk of Mrs. Prudence.
It stuck in his ribs, and in scorn of the writer, and sceptical of her penning it, he tugged to pull it out, and broke the shaft, but left the rankling arrow-head: she had traced the lines, and though tyranny racked her to do that thing, his agony followed her hand over the paper to her name, which fixed and bit in him like the deadly-toothed arrow-head called asp, and there was no uprooting it.
This colour, which lasted for some time, was attributed to a picture which hung at the foot of his, mother's bed, and which she often looked at. It represented a Moor bringing to Cleopatra a basket of flowers, containing the asp by whose bite she destroyed herself.
He impatiently set down the vessel and called the girl loudly, but she did not move till he touched her somewhat roughly with his foot. Then she sprang up as if stung by an asp, and two eyes as black as night flashed at him out of her dark young face; the delicate nostrils of her aquiline nose quivered, and her white teeth gleamed as she cried: "Am I a dog that you wake me in this fashion?"
The former smilingly acquiesced and they were courteously ushered into a stately drawing-room, where a number of the-er-young ladies listened with equally smiling interest to their dissertations on the beauties of a moral life. She of the asp moved to the rear of the drawing-room, where a woman with a delicate, refined face was sitting at a grand piano.
It was Perpetua, quite unable to contain herself, who flung the words in her face. Katharina started as though an asp had stung her and turned round on the woman who had dared to insult her so grossly and so boldly.
Some relate that two faint puncture-marks were found on Cleopatra's arm, and to this account Caesar seems to have given credit; for in his triumph there was carried a figure of Cleopatra, with an asp clinging to her. Such are the various accounts.
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