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When that is done, the reptile often makes its home in the cottage thatch, living on birds and mice. They are dull and sluggish in motion. While visiting a sugar plantation a few years ago one of the hands asked if I should be interested by their maja. He dipped his hand into a nearby water-barrel in the bottom of which two of them were closely coiled.
Next morning I read in a newspaper that the man with whom I had foregathered on the previous day had died from the effects of the bite of a mamba; the reptile had attacked him as he was walking through the bush close to the town. I knew two men at D'Urban. One was Mr. Jack Ellis, at present of the firm of Dyer and Dyer, East London.
One breathless moment, and the reptile turned to follow this new prey. I sank down among the roots regardless of the slime and watched the crocodile crawl deliberately away, with the gallant little dog retreating before him, keeping up a succession of angry barks. When I arrived at the mouth of the creek, weak, faint, and covered from head to foot with mud, I found the Chief Justice awaiting me.
He heartily wished that Kitely was dead dead and buried, and his secret with him; he wished that it had been anywise possible to have crushed the life out of him where he sat in that easy chair as soon as he had shown himself the reptile that he was. A man might kill any poisonous insect, any noxious reptile at pleasure why not a human blood-sucker like that?
The embryos, also, of distinct animals within the same class are often strikingly similar: a better proof of this cannot be given, than a circumstance mentioned by Agassiz, namely, that having forgotten to ticket the embryo of some vertebrate animal, he cannot now tell whether it be that of a mammal, bird, or reptile.
In every case, however, the larger bones were broken, and from this circumstance Otter judged that, although it was the custom of this dreadful reptile to crush the life out of all who were thrown to it with a bite of its fangs, yet, like that of other animals, its appetite was limited, and it was only occasionally that it consumed what it had killed.
"If the eggs of a mammal now differ very essentially from those of a reptile and of an amphibian because in their organization they represent the beginnings only of mammals, even as these represent only the beginnings of reptiles and amphibians, by how much more must they differ from those hypothetical single-celled amoebas which could as yet show no other characteristics than to reproduce amoebas of their own kind."
"A serpent!" cried Dick Sand, who gun, in hand, threw himself before Mrs. Weldon. They might fear, in fact, that some reptile would glide among the plants to the halting place. It would be nothing astonishing if it were one of those enormous "sucurus," kinds of boas, which sometimes measure forty feet in length.
That which was above went and came, free, joyous, dancing, trampling under foot; above him the world which treads, below the world which is trodden upon. It is a fatal fact, and one indicating a profound social evil, that light should crush the shadow! Gwynplaine thoroughly grasped this dark evil. What! a destiny so reptile?
An expression of the deepest awe overspread his countenance, his lips moved, but emitted no sound, and cautiously as he had advanced be returned to the canoe, and was soon swallowed up in the darkness. The abstraction of Holden must have been deep and long, for upon recovering from his reverie, the reptile was gone.
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