293 THE CONFIDENCE-MAN.
a proper view of the universe, that view which is suited to breed a proper confidence, teaches, if I err not, that since all things are justly presided over, not very many living agents but must be some way accountable."
"Is a rattle-snake accountable ?" asked the stranger with such a preternaturally cold, gemmy glance out of his pellucid blue eye, that he seemed more a metaphysical merman than a feeling man ; " is a rattle-snake accountable?"
"If I will not affirm that it is," returned the other, with the caution of no inexperienced thinker, " neither will I deny it. But if we suppose it so, I need not say that such accountability is neither to you, nor me, nor the Court of Common Pleas, but to something superior."
He was proceeding, when the stranger would have interrupted him ; but as reading his argument in his eye, the cosmopolitan, without waiting for it to be put into words, at once spoke to it : "You object to my supposition, for but such it is, that the rattle-snake's accountability is not by nature manifest ; but might not much the same thing be urged against man's? A reductio ad absurdum, proving the objection vain. But if now," he continued, "you consider what capacity for mischief there is in a rattle-snake (observe, I do not charge it with being mischievous, I but say it has the capacity), could you well avoid admitting that that would be no symmetrical view of the universe which should maintain that, while to man it is forbidden to kill, without judicial cause, his fellow, yet the rattle-
