The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 111: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

92 REYNOLDS’ WORKS and Christina as the emissaries passed across the landing to another room. The princess sat calm and self-possessed, but Christina could not help experiencing strange sensations creeping over her. What if by any accident the Hindu’s instinct had so far failed him, and the music had so far lost its wonted charm, that the serpent — if a serpent indeed there were — was actually in that very room? What if presently it should come gliding forth from beneath some piece of furniture, with that stealthy insidiousness which characterizes the reptile species alone? For aught Christina knew to the contrary, death might be close at hand; the agent of destruction might be noiselessly insinuating itself toward herself or her much-loved benefactress. ‘Do not be alarmed, my dear friend,” said the princess, penetrating what was thus passing in the mind of our heroine; ‘you may rest assured that the instinct of the snake- charmer cannot fail him, especially one who in his time was so famous as this Hindu emissary. You would be astonished to behold those snake-charmers in my own native land. They not merely play with the deadly cobra; they irritate and enrage the reptile, but all the while being careful that the peculiar music is sustained, for if the flow of the melody which constitutes the charm for the serpent and the talisman of the charmer’s safety were to cease, that instant were death. There are European travellers and writers who have endeavoured to prove that the poisonous fangs have been torn from the mouth of the cobra before the snake-charmer will venture to play with it, and that therefore the feat re- solves itself into a mere piece of jugglery which could be as well performed with the most innocuous of reptiles. But those writers err, for cases have come within mine own experi- ence — or, rather, within my own knowledge — where men have been bitten by the reptiles with which they were play- ing a little time before, and they had died of those bites. Yor instance, a few years ago, in my father’s sovereign city of Inderabad, an itinerant snake-charmer earned the ap- plause of crowds in every street by the introduction of some novelties into the wonted routine of the performance adopted by men of his class. He retired to rest at night in a hut on the outskirt of the city, — his purse being well filled with coin, and his basket of reptiles — the source of his gains — safely secured, as he thought. In the morning the man was ECORNICLIIOOKS (E(0)