154 DEATH. 
potently armed. Not only is it provided with numerous keen-edged 
teeth; not only are these teeth supplied with an ingenious reservoir 
of poison which slays immediately; but their extreme fineness, which 
renders them liable to fracture, is compensated by an advantage that 
perhaps no other animal possesses; namely, a magazine of super- 
numerary teeth, to supply at need the place of any accidentally 
broken, Oh, what provision for killing! What precautions that the 
victim shall not escape! What love for this horrible creature! I 
stood by it scandulized, if I may so speak, and with a sick soul. 
Nature, the great mother, by whose side I had taken refuge, shocked 
me with a maternity so cruelly impartial. 
Gloomily I walked away, bearing on my heart a darker shadow 
than rested on the day itself, one of the sternest in winter. I had 
come forth like a child; I returned home like an orphan, feeling the 
notion of a Providence dying away within me. 
Our impressions are not less painful when we see in our galleries 
the endless series of birds of prey, prowlers by day and night, 
frightful masks of birds, phantoms which terrify the day itself. One 
is powerfully affected by observing their cruel weapons; I do not 
refer to those terrible beaks which kill with a blow, but those talons, 
those sharpened saws, those instruments of torture which fix the 
shuddering prey, protract the last keen pangs and the agony of 
suffering. 
