"Yes---just as the sunset gun was fired."
In a swoon Clare fell at his feet like one who was dead.
He had been stabbed to the heart! Who, or what was it in his likeness that Clare had seen at the place they were to meet? She was saved from her great temptation--saved to remain a sorrowing and innocent wife. She never again saw the face of Wilmot, even in a dream, though often in the years to come she decked his lonely grave with flowers.
From all we have read and heard of a singular sea-monster that has been seen from time to time in various parts of the ocean, it is difficult to doubt that some such creature, or creatures rather, may exist; though the reiterated allegations of "old salts," that they _do_ exist, may be but a relic of that dark superstition known as serpent-worship, which once prevailed over a great part of the world, and which still lingers in India, particularly among the Nagas, and of which snake-charming is a remnant.
How long this singular worship lingered in Western Europe we may gather from the "Atlas Geographus," published in 1711, which says, "there are _still_ remains of this idolatory" in Lithuania, where the Boors keep adders in their houses, and pay them profound respect while professing Christianity; and also, that few families in Samogitia, are without serpents as household gods.
Some years before this time, Sigismund, Baron of Herbestein, tells us, in his commentaries on Muscovy, that at Troki, eight miles from Wilna, his host acquainted him, that he had chanced to buy a hive of bees from one of the serpent-worshippers, whom he persuaded, with much reluctance, to worship the true God and kill his serpent. A short time after, in passing that way, he found the poor fellow miserably tortured and deformed, his face wrinkled and twisted away; and inquiring the cause, he answered, "That this judgment had come upon him for killing his god, and that he would have to endure greater torments if he did not return to his former worship."
In the sacred writings, but more particularly in the 8th chapter of Jeremiah and the 58th Psalm, are allusions to the taming or keeping of serpents; and Dr. Thomas Shaw found the same superstition prevailing in Barbary in 1757 (Travels).