As he lay there--so still in his heavy lassitude that life itself
seemed to have left him--one of the long green lizards, common to Italy,
crawled over his shoulder. He seized the animal--doubtful for the
moment whether it might not be of the poisonous species--and examined
it. At the first glance he discovered that it was of the harmless order
of its race, and would have flung it carelessly from him, but for
something in its appearance which, in the wayward irritability of his
present mood, he felt a strange and sudden pleasure in contemplating.
Through its exquisitely marked and transparent skin he could perceive
the action of the creature's heart, and saw that it was beating
violently, in the agony of fear caused to the animal by its imprisonment
in his hand. As he looked on it, and thought how continually a being so
timid must be thwarted in its humble anxieties, in its small efforts, in
its little journeys from one patch of grass to another, by a hundred
obstacles, which, trifles though they might be to animals of a higher
species, were yet of fatal importance to creatures constituted like
itself, he began to find an imperfect, yet remarkable analogy between
his own destiny and that of this small unit of creation.
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