FORSAKEN as it appears on an outward view, during the morning of which we now write, the house of Numerian is yet not tenantless. In one of the sleeping apartments, stretched on his couch, with none to watch by its side, lies the master of the little dwelling. We last beheld him on the scene mingled with the famishing congregation in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, still searching for his child amid the confusion of the public distribution of food during the earlier stages of the misfortunes of besieged Rome. Since that time he has toiled and suffered much; and now the day of exhaustion long deferred, the hours of helpless solitude constantly dreaded, have at length arrived.

From the first periods of the siege, while all around him in the city moved gloomily onward through darker and darker changes; while famine rapidly merged into pestilence and death; while human hopes and purposes gradually diminished and declined with each succeeding day, he alone remained ever devoted to the same labor, ever animated by the same object--the only one among all his fellow-citizens whom no outward event could influence for good or evil, for hope or fear.

In every street of Rome, at all hours, among all ranks of people, he was still to be seen constantly pursuing the same hopeless search. When the mob burst furiously into the public granaries to seize the last supplies of corn hoarded for the rich, he was ready at the doors watching them as they came out. When rows of houses were deserted by all but the dead, he was beheld within, passing from window to window, as he sought through each room for the treasure that he had lost. When some few among the populace, in the first days of the pestilence, united in the vain attempt to cast over the lofty walls the corpses that strewed the street, he mingled with them to look on the rigid faces of the dead. In solitary places, where the parent not yet lost to affection strove to carry his dying child from the desert roadway to the shelter of a roof--where the wife, still faithful to her duties, received her husband's last breath in silent despair, he was seen gliding by their sides, and for one brief instant looking on them with attentive and mournful eyes. Wherever he went, whatever he beheld, he asked no sympathy and sought no aid. He went his way, a pilgrim on a solitary path; an unregarded expectant for a boon that no others could care to partake.

When the famine first began to be felt in the city, he seemed unconscious of its approach--he made no effort to procure beforehand the provision of a few days' sustenance; if he attended the first public distributions of food, it was to prosecute his search for his child amid the throng around him. He must have perished with the first feeble victims of starvation, had he not been met, during his solitary wanderings, by some of the members of the congregation whom his piety and eloquence had collected in former days.

By these persons, whose entreaties that he would suspend his hopeless search he always answered with the same firm and patient denial, his course was carefully watched and his wants anxiously provided for. Out of every supply of food which they were enabled to collect, his share was invariably carried to his abode. They remembered their teacher in the hour of his dejection, as they had formerly reverenced him in the; day of his vigor; they toiled to preserve his life as anxiously as they had labored to profit by his instructions; they listened as his disciples once, they served him as his children now.

But over these, as over all other offices of human kindness, the famine was destined gradually and surely to prevail. The provision of food garnered up by the congregation ominously lessened with each succeeding day. When the pestilence began darkly to appear, the numbers of those who sought their afflicted teacher at his abode, or followed him through the dreary streets, fatally decreased.

Then, as the nourishment which had supported and the vigilance which had watched him thus diminished, so did the hard-tasked energies of the unhappy father fail him faster and faster. Each morning as he arose, his steps were more feeble, his heart grew heavier within him, his wanderings through the city were less and less resolute and prolonged. At length his powers totally deserted him; the last-left members of his congregation, as they approached his abode with the last-left provision of food which they possessed, found him prostrate with exhaustion at his garden gate. They bore him to his couch, placed their charitable offering by his side, and leaving one of their number to protect him from the robber and the assassin, they quitted the house in despair.

For some days the guardian remained faithful to his post, until his sufferings from lack of food overpowered his vigilance. Dreading that, in his extremity, he might be tempted to take from the old man's small store of provision what little remained, he fled from the house to seek sustenance, however loathsome, in the public streets; and thenceforth Numerian was left defenseless in his solitary abode.

He was first beheld on the scenes which these pages present a man of austere purpose, of unwearied energy; a valiant reformer who defied all difficulties that beset him in his progress; a triumphant teacher leading at his will whoever listened to his words; a father proudly contemplating the future position which he destined for his child. Far different did he now appear. Lost to his ambition, broken in spirit, helpless in body, separated from his daughter by his own act, he lay on his untended couch in a death-like lethargy. The cold wind blowing through his opened window awakened no sensations in his torpid frame; the cup of water and the small relies of coarse food stood near his hand, but he had no vigilance to discern them. His open eyes looked steadfastly upward, and yet be reposed as one in a deep sleep, or as one already devoted to the tomb, save when, at intervals, his lips moved slowly with a long and painfully-drawn breath, or a fever-flush tinged his hollow cheek with changing and momentary hues.

While thus in outward aspect appearing to linger between life and death, his faculties yet remained feebly vital within him. Aroused by no external influence, and governed by no mental restraint, they now created before him a strange waking vision, palpable as an actual event.

It seemed to him that he was reposing, not in his own chamber, but in some mysterious world, filled with a twilight atmosphere, inexpressibly soothing and gentle to his aching sight. Through this mild radiance he could trace, at long intervals, shadowy representations of the scenes through which he had passed in search of his lost child. The gloomy streets, the lonely houses abandoned to the unburied dead, which he had explored, alternately appeared and vanished before him in solemn succession; and ever and anon, as one vision disappeared ere another rose, he heard afar off a sound as of gentle, womanly voices, murmuring in solemn accents, "The search has been made in penitence, in patience, in prayer, and has not been pursued in vain. The lost shall return--the beloved shall yet be restored!"

Thus, as it had begun, the vision long continued. Now the scenes through which he had wandered passed slowly before his eyes, now the soft voices murmured pityingly in his ear. At length the first disappeared, and the last became silent; then ensued a long vacant interval, and then the gray, tranquil light brightened slowly at one spot, out of which he beheld advancing toward him the form of his lost child.

She came to his side, she bent lovingly over him; he saw her eyes, with their old patient, childlike expression, looking sorrowfully down upon him. His heart revived to a sense of unspeakable awe and contrition, to emotions of yearning love and mournful hope; his speech returned; he whispered tremulously, "Child! child! I repented in bitter woe the wrong that I did to thee; I sought thee, in my loneliness on earth, through the long day and the gloomy night! And now the merciful God has sent thee to pardon me! I loved thee; I wept for thee."

His voice died within him, for now his outward sensations quickened. He felt warm tears falling on his cheeks; he felt embracing arms clasped around him; he heard tenderly repeated, "Father, speak to me as you were wont; love me, father, and forgive me, as you loved and forgave me when I was a little child!"

The sound of that well-remembered voice--which had ever spoken kindly and reverently to him; which had last addressed him in tones of despairing supplication; which he had hardly hoped to hear again on earth--penetrated his whole being, like awakening music in the dead silence of night. His eyes lost their vacant expression; he raised himself suddenly on the couch; he saw that what had begun as a vision had ended as a reality; that his dream had proved the immediate forerunner of its own fulfillment; that his daughter in her bodily presence was indeed restored; and his head drooped forward, and he trembled and wept upon her bosom in the overpowering fullness of his gratitude and delight.

For some moments Antonina, calming with the resolute heroism of affection her own thronging emotions of awe and affright, endeavored to soothe and support her fast-failing parent. Her horror almost overwhelmed her, as she thought that now, when through grief and peril she was at last restored to him, he might expire in her arms; but even yet her resolution did not fail her. The last hope of her brief and bitter life was now the hope of reviving her father; and she clung to it with the tenacity of despair.

She calmed her voice while she spoke to him; she entreated him to remember that his daughter had returned to watch over him, to be his obedient pupil as in days of old. Vain effort! Even while the words passed her lips, his arms, which had been pressed over her, relaxed; his head grew heavier on her bosom. In the despair of the moment, she tore herself from him, and looked around to seek the help that none were near to afford. The cup of water, the last provision of food, attracted her eye. With quick instinct she caught them up. hope, success, salvation, lay in those miserable relics. She pressed the food into his mouth; she moistened his parched lips, his dry brow, with the water. During one moment of horrible suspense she saw him still insensible; then the vital functions revived; his eyes opened again, and fixed famine-struck on the wretched nourishment before him. He devoured it ravenously; he drained the cup of water to its last drop; he sank back again on the couch. But now the torpid blood moved once more in his veins; his heart beat less and less feebly; he was saved. She saw it as she bent over him--saved by the lost child in the hour of her return! It was a sensation of ecstatic triumph and gratitude, which no woful remembrances had power to embitter in its bright, sudden birth! She knelt down by the side of the couch, almost crashed by her own emotions. Over the grave of the young warrior she had raised her heart to Heaven in agony and grief, and now by her father's side she poured forth her whole soul to her Creator in trembling ejaculations of thankfulness and hope!

Thus--the one slowly recovering whatever of life and vigor yet continued in his weakened frame, the other still filled with her all-absorbing emotions of gratitude--the father and daughter long remained. And now, as morning waned toward noon, the storm began to subside. Gradually and solemnly the vast thunder-clouds rolled asunder, and the bright blue heaven beyond appeared through their fantastic rifts. The lessening rain-drops fell light and silvery to the earth, and breeze and sunshine were wafted at fitful intervals over the plague-tainted atmosphere of Rome. As yet, subdued by the shadows of the floating clouds, the dawning sunbeams glittered softly through the windows of Numerian's chamber. They played, warm and reviving, over his worn features, like messengers of resurrection and hope from their native heaven. Life seemed to expand within him under their fresh and gentle ministering. Once more he raised himself and turned toward his child; and now his heart throbbed with a healthful joy, and his arms closed round her, not in the helplessness of infirmity, but in the welcome of love.

His words, when he spoke to her, fell at first almost inarticulately from his lips--they were mingled together in confused phrases of tenderness, contrition, thanksgiving. All the native enthusiasm of his disposition, all the latent love for his child, which had for years been suppressed by his austerity or diverted by his ambition, now at last burst forth.

Trembling and silent in his arms, Antonina vainly endeavored to return his caresses, and to answer his words of welcome. Now for the first time she knew how deep was her father's affection for her; she felt how foreign to his real nature had been his assumed severity in their intercourse of former days; and in the quick flow of new feelings and old recollections produced by the delighting surprise of the discovery, she found herself speechless. She could only listen eagerly, breathlessly, while he spoke. His words, faltering and confused though they were, were words of endearment which she had never heard from him before; they were words which no mother had ever pronounced beside her infant bed; and they sank divinely consoling over her heart, as messages of pardon from angels' lips.

Gradually Numerian s voice grew calmer. He raised his daughter in his arms, and bent wistfully on her face his attentive and pitying eyes. "Returned, returned!" he murmured, while he gazed on her, "never again to depart! Returned, beautiful and patient, kinder and more tender than ever! Love me and pardon me, Antonina. I sought for you in bitter loneliness and despair. Think not of me as what I was, but as what I am! There were days when you were yet an infant, when I had no thought but how to cherish and delight you, and now those days have come again. You shall read no gloomy taskbooks; you shall never be separated from me more; you shall play sweet music on the lute: you shall be all garlanded with flowers which I will provide for you! We will find friends and glad companions; we will bring happiness with us wherever we are seen! God's blessing goes forth from children like you: it has fallen upon me--it has raised me from the dead! My Antonina shall teach me to worship, as I once taught her. She shall pray for me in the morning, and pray for me at night; and when she thinks not of it, when she sleeps, I shall come softly to her bedside, and wait and watch over her, so that when she opens her eyes they shall open on me--they are the eyes of my child who has been restored to me--there is nothing on earth that can speak to me like them of happiness and peace!"

He paused for a moment, and looked rapturously on her face as it was turned toward him. His features partially saddened while he gazed; and taking her long hair--still wet and disheveled from the rain--in his hands, he pressed it over his lips, over his face, over his neck. Then, when he saw that she was endeavoring to speak, when he beheld the tears that were now filling her eyes, he drew her closer to him, and hurriedly continued, in lower tones:

"Hush! hush! No more grief--no more tears! Tell me not whither you have wandered--speak not of what you have suffered; for would not every word be a reproach to me? And you have come to pardon and not to reproach! Let not the recollection that it was I who cast you off be forced on me from your lips! let us remember only that we are restored to each other; let us think that God has accepted my penitence and forgiven me my sin, in suffering my child to return! Or, if we must speak of the days of separation that are past, speak to me of the days that found you tranquil and secure; rejoice me, by telling me that it was not all danger and woe in the bitter destiny which my guilty anger prepared for my own child! Say to me that you met protectors as well as enemies in the hour of your flight--that all were not harsh to you, as I was--that those of whom you asked shelter and safety, looked on your face as on a petition for charity and kindness from friends whom they loved! Tell me only of your protectors, Antonina, for in that there will be consolation; and you have come to console!"

As he waited for her reply, he felt her tremble on his bosom, he saw the shudder that ran over her frame. The despair in her voice, though she only pronounced in answer to him the simple words, "There was one"--and then ceased, unable to proceed--penetrated coldly to his heart. "Is he not at hand?" he hurriedly resumed. "Why is he not here? Let us seek him without delay. I must humble myself before him, in my gratitude. I must show him that I was worthy that my Antonina should be restored."

"He is dead!" she gasped, sinking down in the arms that embraced her, as the recollections of the past night again crowded in all their horror on her memory. "They murdered him by my side.--Oh, father, father! he loved me; he would have reverenced and protected you!"

"May the merciful God receive him among the blessed angels, and honor him among the holy martyrs!" cried the father, raising his tearful eyes in supplication. "May his spirit, if it can still be observant of the things of earth, know that his name shall be written on my heart with the name of my child; that I will think on him as on a beloved companion, and mourn for him as for a son that has been taken from me!"

He ceased, and looked down on Antonina, whose features were still hidden from him. Each felt that a new bond of mutual affection had been created between them by what each had spoken, but both now remained silent.

During this interval, the thoughts of Numerian wandered from the reflections which had hitherto occupied him. The few mournful words which his daughter had spoken had been sufficient to banish its fullness of joy from his heart, and to turn him from the happy contemplation of the present to the dark recollections of the past. Vague doubts and fears now mingled with his gratitude and hope; and involuntarily his thoughts reverted to what he would fain have forgotten forever--to the morning when he had driven Antonina from her home.

Baseless apprehensions of the return of the treacherous pagan and his profligate employer, with the return of their victim--despairing convictions of his own helplessness and infirmity, rose startlingly in his mind. His eyes wandered vacantly round the room, his hands closed trembling over his daughter's form; then, suddenly releasing her, he arose as one panic-stricken, and exclaiming, "The doors must be secured!--Ulpius may be near--the senator may return!" endeavored to cross the room. But his strength was unequal to the effort; he leaned back for support against the wall, and breathlessly repeating: "Secure the doors!--Ulpius, Ulpius!" he motioned to Antonina to descend.

She trembled as she obeyed him. Remembering her passage through the breach in the wall, and her fearful journey through the streets of Rome, she more than shared her father's apprehensions as she descended the stairs.

The door remained half open, as she had left it when she entered the house. Ere she hurriedly closed and barred it, she cast a momentary glance on the street beyond. The gaunt figures of the slaves still moved wearily to and fro amid the mockery of festal preparation in Vetranio's palace, and here and there a few ghastly figures lay on the ground contemplating them in languid amazement. Over all other parts of the street the deadly tranquillity of plague and famine still prevailed.

Hurriedly ascending the steps, Antonina hastened to assure her father that she had obeyed his commands, and that they were now secure from all intrusion from without. But, during her brief absence a new and more ominous prospect of calamity had presented itself before the old man's mind.

As she entered the room, she saw that he had returned to his couch, and that he was holding before him the little wooden bowl which had contained his last supply of food, and which was now empty. He addressed not a word to her when he heard her enter; his features were rigid with horror and despair as he looked down on the empty bowl, he muttered vacantly, "It was the last provision that remained, and it was I that exhausted it! The beasts of the forests carry food to their young, and I have taken the last morsel from my child!"

In an instant the utter desolateness of their situation--forgotten in the first joy of their meeting--forced itself with appalling vividness upon Antonina's mind. She endeavored to speak of comfort and hope to her father; but the fearful realities of the famine in the city now rose palpably before her, and suspended the vain words of solace on her lips. In the midst of still populous Rome, within sight of those surrounding plains where the creative sun ripened hour by hour the vegetation of the teeming earth, where field and granary displayed profusely their abundant stores, the father and daughter now looked on each other, as helpless to replace their exhausted provision of food as if they had been abandoned on the raft of the shipwrecked in an unexplored sea, or banished to a lonely island, whose inland products were withered by infected winds, and around whose arid shores ran such destroying waters as seethe over the "Cities of the Plain."

The silence which had long prevailed in the room, the bitter reflections which still held the despairing father and the patient daughter speechless alike, were at length interrupted by a hollow and melancholy voice from the street, pronouncing, in the form of a public notice, these words:

"I, Publius Dalmatius, messenger of the Roman Senate, proclaim, that in order to clear the streets from the dead, three thousand sestertii will be given by the Prefect for every ten bodies that are cast over the walls. This is the true decree of the Senate."

The voice ceased; but no sound of applause, no murmur of popular tumult was heard in answer. Then, after an interval, it was once more faintly audible as the messenger passed on and repeated the decree in another street; and then the silence again sunk down over all things more awfully pervading than before.

Every word of the proclamation, when repeated in the distance, as when spoken under his window, had reached Numerian's ears. His mind, already sinking in despair, was riveted on what he had heard from the woe-boding voice of the herald, with a fascination as absorbing as that which rivets the eye of the traveler, already giddy on the summit of a precipice, upon the spectacle of the yawning gulfs beneath. When all sound of the proclamation had finally died away, the unhappy father dropped the empty bowl which he had hitherto mechanically continued to hold before him, and glancing affrightedly at his daughter, groaned to himself: "The corpses are to be cast over the walls; the dead are to be flung forth to the winds of heaven!--there is no help for us in the city. Oh, God, God!--she may die!--her body may be cast away like the rest, and I may live to see it!"

He rose suddenly from the couch; his reason seemed for a moment to be shaken as he tottered to the window, crying "Food! food!--I will give my house and all it contains for a morsel of food--I have nothing to support my own child--she will starve before me by to-morrow if I have no food! I am a citizen of Rome--I demand help from the Senate! Food! food!"

In tones declining lower and lower he continued to cry thus from the window, but no voice answered him either in sympathy or derision. Of all the people--now increased in numbers--collected in the street before Vetranio's palace, not one turned even to look on him. For days and days past such fruitless appeals as his had been heard, and heard unconcernedly at every hour and in every street of Rome--now ringing through the heavy air in the shrieks of delirium, now faintly audible in the last faltering murmurs of exhaustion and despair.

Thus vainly entreating help and pity from a populace who had ceased to give the one or to feel the other, Numerian might long have remained; but now his daughter approached his side, and drawing him gently toward his couch, said in tender and solemn accents, "Remember, father, that God sent the ravens to feed Elijah, and replenish the widow's cruse! He will not desert us, for he has restored us to each other; and has sent me hither not to perish in the famine, but to watch over you!"

"God has deserted the city and all that it contains!" he answered, distractedly. "The angel of destruction has gone forth into our streets, and Death walks in his shadow! On this day, when hope and happiness seemed opening before us both, our little household has been doomed! The young and the old, the weary and the watchful, they strew the streets alike--the famine has mastered them all--the famine will master us--there is no help, no escape! I, who would have died patiently for my daughter's safety, must now die despairingly, leaving her friendless in the wide, dreary, perilous world; in the dismal city of anguish, of horror, of death--where the enemy threatens without, and hunger and pestilence waste within! Oh, Antonina! you have returned to me but for a little time; the day of our second separation draws near!"

For a few moments his head drooped and his sobs choked his utterance; then he once more rose painfully to his feet. Heedless of Antonina's entreaties, he again endeavored to cross the room, only again to find his feeble powers unequal to sustain him. As he fell back panting upon a seat, his eyes assumed a wild, unnatural expression--despair of mind and weakness of body had together partially unhinged his faculties. When his daughter affrightedly approached to soothe and succor him, he impatiently waved her back; and began to speak in a dull, hoarse, monotonous voice, pressing his hand firmly over his brow, and directing his eyes backward and forward incessantly, on object after object, in every part of the room.

"Listen, child, listen!" he hastily began; "I tell you there is no food in the house, and no food in Rome!--we are besieged--they have taken from us our granaries in the suburbs and our fields on the plains--there is a great famine in the city--those who still eat, eat strange food which men sicken at when it is named. I would seek even this, but I have no strength to go forth into the by-ways and force it from others at the point of the sword! I am old and feeble, and heart-broken--I shall die first, and leave fatherless my good, kind daughter, whom I sought for so long, and whom I loved as my only child!"

He paused for an instant--not to listen to the words of encouragement and hope which Antonina mechanically addressed to him while he spoke, but to collect his wandering thoughts, to rally his failing strength. His voice acquired a quicker tone, and his features presented a sudden energy and earnestness of expression, as if some new project had flashed across his mind, when, after an interval, he continued thus:

"But though my child shall be bereaved of me, though I shall die in the hour when I most longed to live for her, I must not leave her helpless; I will send her among my congregation who have deserted me, but who will repent when they hear that I am dead, and will receive Antonina among them for my sake. Listen to this--listen, listen! You must tell them to remember all that I once revealed to them of my brother, from whom I parted in my boyhood--my brother, whom I have never seen since: he may yet be alive, he may be found; they must search for him--for to you, he would be father to the fatherless and guardian to the unguarded: he may now be in Rome, he may be rich and powerful--he may have food to spare, and shelter that is good against all enemies and strangers! Attend, child, to my words: in these latter days I have thought of him much; I have seen him in dreams as I saw him for the last time in my father's house; he was happier and more beloved than I was; and in envy and hatred I quitted my parents and parted from him. You have heard nothing of this; but you must hear it now; that when I am dead you may know you have a protector to seek! So I received in anger my brother's farewell, and fled from my home--(those days were well remembered by me once, but all things grow dull on my memory now)--long years of turmoil and change passed on, and I never met him; and men of many nations were my companions, but he was not among them; then much affliction fell upon me, and I repented and learned the fear of God, and went back to my father's house. Since that, years have passed--I know not how many; I could have told them when I spoke of my former life to him; to my friend, when we stood near St. Peter's, ere the city was besieged, looking on the sunset, and speaking of the early days of our companionship; but now my very remembrance fails me; the famine that threatens us with separation and death, casts darkness over my thoughts; yet hear me, hear me patiently--for your sake I must continue!"

"Not now, father--not now! At another time, on a happier day! " murmured Antonina, in tremulous, entreating tones.

"My home, when I arrived to look on it, was gone," pursued the old man, sadly, neither heeding nor hearing her. "Other houses were built where my father's house had stood; no man, could tell me of my parents and my brother; then I returned, and my former companions grew hateful in my eyes; I left them, and they followed me with persecution and scorn. Listen, listen I--I set forth secretly in the night, with you, to escape them; and to make perfect my reformation where they should not be near to hinder it; and we traveled onward many days until we came to Rome, and I made my abode there. But I feared that my companions whom I abhorred might discover and persecute me again; and in the new city of my dwelling I called myself by another name than the name that I bore; thus I knew that all trace of me would be lost, and that I should be kept secure from men whom I thought on only as enemies now. Go, child!--go quickly!--bring your tablets and write down the names that I shall tell you; for so you will discover your protector when I am gone! Say not to him that you are the child of Numerian--he knows not the name; say that you are the daughter of Cleander, his brother, who died longing to be restored to him--write! write carefully, Cleander!--that was the name my father gave to me, that was the name I bore until I fled from my evil companions and changed it, dreading their pursuit! Cleander! write and remember, Cleander! I have seen in visions that my brother shall be discovered: he will not be discovered to me, but he will be discovered to you! Your tablets--your tablets! write his name with mine--it is--"

He stopped abruptly. His mental powers, fluctuating between torpor and animation--shaken, but not overpowered by the trials which had assailed them--suddenly rallied, and resuming somewhat of their accustomed balance, became a wakened to a sense of their own aberration. His vague revelations of his past life (which the reader will recognize as resembling his communications on the same subject to the fugitive landowner, previously related) now appeared before him in all their incongruity and uselessness. His countenance fell--he sighed bitterly to himself: "My reason begins to desert me!--my judgment, which should guide my child--my resolution, which should uphold her, both fail me! How should my brother, since boyhood lost to me, be found by her? Against the famine that threatens us, I offer but vain words!--already her strength declines: her face, that I loved to look on, grows wan before my eyes! God have mercy upon us! God have mercy upon us!"

He returned feebly to his couch, his head declined on his bosom; sometimes a low groan burst from his lips, but he spoke no more.

Deep as was the prostration under which he had now fallen, it was yet less painful to Antonina to behold it than to listen to the incoherent revelations which had fallen from his lips but the moment before, and which, in her astonishment and affright. she had dreaded might be the awful indications of the overthrow of her father's reason. As she again placed herself by his side, she trembled to feel that her own weariness was fast overpowering her; but she still struggled with her rising despair--still strove to think only of capacity for endurance and chances of relief.

The silence in the room was deep and dismal, while they now sat together. The faint breezes, at long intervals, drowsily rose and fell, as they floated through the open window; the fitful sunbeams alternately appeared and vanished, as the clouds rolled upward in airy succession over the face of heaven. Time moved sternly in its destined progress, and Nature varied tranquilly through its appointed limits of change, and still no hopes, no saving projects, nothing but dark recollections and woful anticipations occupied Antonina's mind--when, just as her weary head was drooping toward the ground--just as sensation and fortitude and grief itself seemed declining into a dreamless and deadly sleep--a last thought, void of discernible connection or cause, rose suddenly within her, animating, awakening, inspiring. She started up. "The garden, father--the garden!" she cried, breathlessly. "Remember the food that grows in our garden below! be comforted, we have provision left yet--God has not deserted us!"

He raised his face while she spoke; his features assumed a deeper mournfulness and hopelessness of expression; he looked upon her in ominous silence, and laid his trembling fingers on her arm to detain her, when she hurriedly attempted to quit the room.

"Do not forbid me to depart," she anxiously pleaded. "To me every corner in the garden is known, for it was my possession in our happier days; our last hopes rest on the garden, and I must search through it without delay! Bear with me," she added, in low and melancholy tones, "bear with me, dear father, in all that I would now do! I have suffered, since we parted, a bitter affliction, which clings dark and heavy to all my thoughts; there is no consolation for me but the privilege of caring for your welfare--my only hope of comfort is in the employment of aiding you!"

The old man's hand had pressed heavier on her arm, while she addressed him; but when she ceased, it dropped from her, and he bent his head in speechless submission to her entreaty. For one moment she lingered, looking on him silent as himself; the next, she left the apartment with hasty and uncertain steps.

On reaching the garden, she unconsciously took the path leading to the bank where she had once loved to play secretly upon her lute, and to look on the distant mountains reposing in the warm atmosphere which summer evenings shed over their blue expanse. How eloquent was this little plot of ground of the quiet events now forever gone by--of the joys, the hopes, the happy occupations, which rise with the day that chronicles them, and pass like that day never to return the same--which the memory alone can preserve as they were; and the heart can never resume but in a changed form, divested of the presence of the companion, of the incident of the departed moment, which formed the charm of the past and makes the imperfection of the present!

Tender and thronging were the remembrances which the surrounding prospect called up, as the sad mistress of the garden looked again on her little domain! She saw the bank where she could never more sit to sing with a renewal of the same feelings which had once inspired her music--she saw the drooping flowers that she could never restore with the same child-like enjoyment of the task which had animated her in former hours! Young though she still was, the emotions of the youthful days that were gone could never be revived as they had once existed! As waters they had welled up, and as waters they had flowed forth, never to return to their source! Thoughts of these former years--of the young warrior who lay cold beneath the heavy earth--of the desponding father who mourned hopeless in the room above--gathered thick at her heart, as she turned from her flower-beds--not, as in other days, to pour forth her happiness to the music of her lute, but to search laboriously for the sustenance of life.

At first, as she stooped over those places in the garden where she knew that fruits and vegetables had been planted by her own hand, her tears blinded her; she hastily dashed them away, and looked eagerly around.

Alas, others had reaped the field from which she had hoped abundance! In the early days of the famine, Numerian's congregation had entered the garden, and gathered for him whatever it contained; its choicest and its homeliest products were alike exhausted; withered leaves lay on the barren earth, and naked branches waved over them in the air. She wandered from path to path, searching amid the briers and thistles, which already cast an aspect of ruin over the deserted place; she explored its most hidden corners with the painful perseverance of despair; but the same barrenness spread around her wherever she turned. On this once fertile spot, which she had entered with such joyful faith in its resources, there remained but a few decayed roots, dropped and forgotten amid tangled weeds and faded flowers.

She saw that they were barely sufficient for one scanty meal, as she collected them, and returned slowly to the house. No words escaped her, no tears flowed over her checks, when she reascended the steps--hope, fear, thought, sensation itself, had been stunned within her, from the first moment when she had discovered that, in the garden as in the house, the inexorable famine had anticipated the last chances of relief.

She entered the room, and still holding the withered roots, advanced mechanically to her father's side. During her absence, his mental and bodily faculties had both yielded to wearied nature--he lay in a deep, heavy sleep.

Her mind experienced a faint relief when she saw that the fatal necessity of confessing the futility of the hopes she had herself awakened was spared her for a while. She knelt down by Numerian, and gently smoothed the hair over brow; then she drew the curtain across the window, for she feared even that the breeze blowing through it might arouse him. A strange, secret satisfaction at the idea of devoting to her father every moment of the time and every particle of the strength that might yet be reserved for her--a ready resignation to death, in dying for him--overspread her heart, and took the place of all other aspirations and all other thoughts.

She now moved to and fro through the room, with a cautious tranquillity which nothing could startle; she prepared her decayed roots for food, with a patient attention which nothing could divert. Lost, through the aggravated miseries of her position, to recent grief and present apprehension, she could still instinctively perform the simple offices of the woman and the daughter, as she might have performed them amid a peaceful nation and a prosperous home. Thus do the first-born affections outlast the exhaustion of all the stormy emotions, all the aspiring thoughts of after years, which may occupy, but which cannot absorb, the spirit within us; thus does their friendly and familiar voice, when the clamor of contending passions has died away in its own fury, speak again, serene, and sustaining as in the early time, when the mind moved secure within the limits of its native simplicity, and the heart yet lay happy in the pure tranquillity of its first repose!

The last scanty measure of food was soon prepared; it was bitter and unpalatable when she tasted it--life could barely be preserved, even in the most vigorous, by provision so wretched--but she set it aside as carefully as if it had been the most precious luxury of the most abundant feast.

Nothing had changed during the interval of solitary employment--her father yet slept; the gloomy silence yet prevailed in the street. She placed herself at the window, and partially drew aside the curtain to let the warm breezes from without blow over her cold brow. The same ineffable resignation, the same unnatural quietude, which had sunk down over her faculties since she had entered the room, overspread them still. Surrounding objects failed to impress her attention; recollections and forebodings stagnated in her mind. A marble composure prevailed over her features; sometimes her eyes wandered mechanically from the morsels of food by her side to her sleeping father, as her one vacant idea of watching for his service, till the feeble pulses of life had throbbed their last, alternately revived and declined; but no other evidences of bodily existence or mental activity appeared in her. As she now sat in the half--darkened room, by the couch on which her father reposed--her features pale, calm, and rigid, her form enveloped in cold white drapery--there were moments when she looked like one of the penitential devotees of the primitive Church appointed to watch in the house of mourning, and surprised on her saintly vigil by the advent of death.

Time flowed on--the monotonous hours of the day waned again toward night; and plague and famine told their lapse in the fated highways of Rome. For father and child the sand in the glass was fast running out; and neither marked it as it diminished. The sleeper still reposed, and the guardian by his side still watched; but now her weary gaze was directed on the street, unconsciously attracted by the sound of voices, which at length rose from it at intervals, and by the light of torches and lamps, which appeared in the great palace of the senator Vetranio, as the sun gradually declined in the horizon, and the fiery clouds around were quenched in the vapors of the advancing night. Steadily she looked upon the sight beneath and before her; but, even yet, her limbs never moved; no expression relieved the blank, solemn peacefulness of her features.

Meanwhile, the soft, brief twilight glimmered over the earth, and showed the cold moon, poised solitary in the starless heaven--then the stealthy darkness arose at her pale signal, and closed slowly round the City of Death!

OF all prophecies none are, perhaps, so frequently erroneous as those on which we are most apt to venture, in endeavoring to foretell the effect of outward events on the characters of men. In no form of our anticipations are we more frequently baffled than in such attempts to estimate beforehand the influence of circumstance over conduct, not only in others, but also even in ourselves. Let the event but happen, and men, whom we view by the light of our previous observation of them, act under it as the living contradictions of their own characters. The friend of our daily social intercourse, in the progress of life, and the favorite hero of our historic studies, in the progress of the page, astonish, exceed, or disappoint our expectations alike. We find it as vain to foresee a cause, as to fix a limit, for the arbitrary inconsistencies in the dispositions of mankind.

But though to speculate upon the future conduct of others under impending circumstances be but too often to expose the fallacy of our wisest anticipations, to contemplate the nature of that conduct after it has been displayed is a useful subject of curiosity, and may perhaps be made a fruitful source of instruction. Similar events which succeed each other at different periods are relieved from monotony, and derive new importance, from the ever-varying effects which they produce on the human character. Thus, in the great occurrence which forms the foundation of our narrative, we may find little in the siege of Rome, looking at it as a mere event, to distinguish it remarkably from any former siege of the city--the same desire for glory and vengeance, wealth and dominion, which brought Alaric to her walls, brought other invaders before him. But if we observe the effect of the Gothic descent upon Italy on the inhabitants of her capital, we shall find ample matter for novel contemplation and unbounded surprise.

We shall perceive, as an astonishing instance of the inconsistencies of the human character, the spectacle of a whole people resolutely defying an overwhelming foreign invasion at their very doors, just at the period when they had fallen most irremediably from the highest position of national glory to the lowest depths of national degradation; resisting an all-powerful enemy with inflexible obstinacy, for the honor of the Roman name, which they had basely dishonored or carelessly forgotten for ages past. We shall behold men, who have hitherto laughed at the very name of patriotism, now starving resolutely in their country's cause; who stopped at no villainy to obtain wealth, now hesitating to employ their ill-gotten gains in the purchase of the most important of all gratifications--their own security and peace. Instances of the unimaginable effect produced by the event of the siege of Rome on the characters of her inhabitants might be drawn from all classes, from the lowest to the highest, from patrician to plebeian; but to produce them here would be to admit too long an interruption in the progress of the present narrative. If we are to enter at all into detail on such a subject, it must be only in a case clearly connected with the actual requirements of our story; and such a case may be found, at this juncture, in the conduct of the senator Vetranio, under the influence of the worst calamities attending the blockade of Rome by the Goths.

Who, it may be asked, knowing the previous character of this man, his frivolity of disposition, his voluptuous anxiety for unremitting enjoyment and ease, his horror of the slightest approaches of affliction or pain, would have imagined him capable of rejecting in disdain all the minor chances of present security and future prosperity which his unbounded power and wealth might have procured for him, even in a famine-stricken city, and rising suddenly to the sublime of criminal desperation, in the resolution to abandon life as worthless the moment it had ceased to run in the easy current of all former years? Yet to this determination had he now arrived; and still more extraordinary, in this determination had he found others, of his own patrician order, to join him.

The reader will remember his wild announcement of his intended orgy to the Prefect Pompeianus, during the earlier periods of the siege; that announcement was now to be fulfilled. Vetranio had bidden his guests to the Banquet of Famine. A chosen number of the senators of the great city were to vindicate their daring by dying the revelers that they had lived; by resigning in contempt all prospect of starving, like the common herd, on a lessening daily pittance of loathsome food; by making their triumphant exit from a fettered and ungrateful life, drowned in floods of wine, and lighted by the fires of the wealthiest palace of Rome!

It had been intended to keep this frantic determination a profound secret, to let the mighty catastrophe burst upon the remaining inhabitants of the city like a prodigy from heaven; but the slaves intrusted with the organization of the suicide banquet had been bribed to their tasks with wine, and in the carelessness of intoxication had revealed to others whatever they heard within the palace walls. The news passed from mouth to mouth. There was enough in the prospect of beholding the burning palace and the drunken suicide of its desperate guests, to animate even the stagnant curiosity of a famishing mob.

On the appointed evening the people dragged their weary limbs from all quarters of the city toward the Pincian Hill. Many of them died on the way; many lost their resolution to proceed to the end of their journey, and took shelter sullenly in the empty houses on the road; many found opportunities for plunder and crime as they proceeded, which tempted them from their destination; but many persevered in their purpose, the living dragging the dying along with them, the desperate driving the cowardly before them in malignant sport, until they gained the palace gates. It was by their voices, as they reached her ear from the street, that the fast-sinking faculties of Antonina had been startled, though not revived; and there, on the broad pavement, lay these citizens of a falling city; a congregation of pestilence and crime--a starving and an awful band!

The moon, brightened by the increasing darkness, now clearly illuminated the street, and revealed, in a narrow space, a various and impressive scene.

One side of the roadway in which stood Vetranio's palace was occupied along each extremity, as far as the eye could reach at night, by the groves and outbuildings attached to the senator's mansion. The palace grounds, at the higher and further end of the street--looking from the Pincian Gate--crossed it by a wide archway, and then stretched backward, until they joined the trees of the little garden of Numerian's abode. In a line with this house, but separated from it by a short space, stood a long row of buildings, let out floor by floor to separate occupants, and towering to an unwieldy altitude--for in Ancient Rome, as in Modern London, in consequence of the high price of land in an overpopulated city, builders could only secure space in a dwelling by adding inconveniently to its height. Beyond these habitations rose the trees surrounding another patrician abode, and beyond that the houses took a sudden turn, and nothing more was visible in a straight line but the dusky, indefinite objects of the distant view.

The whole appearance of the street before Vetranio's mansion, had it been unoccupied by the repulsive groups now formed in it, would have been eminently beautiful, at the hour of which we now write. The nobly symmetrical frontage of the palace itself, with its graceful succession of long porticoes and colossal statues, contrasted by the picturesquely irregular appearance of the opposite dwelling of Numerian and the lofty houses by its side; the soft, indistinct masses of foliage, running parallel along the upper ends of the street, terminated and connected by the archway garden across the road, on which planted a group of tall pine-trees, rising in gigantic relief against the transparent sky; the brilliant light streaming across the pavement from Vetranio's gayly-curtained windows, immediately opposed by the tranquil moonlight which lit the more distant view--formed altogether a prospect in which the natural and the artificial were mingled together in the most exquisite proportions--a prospect whose ineffable poetry and beauty might, on any other night, have charmed the most careless eye and exalted the most frivolous mind. But now, overspread as it was by groups of people, gaunt with famine and hideous with disease; startled as it was, at gloomy intervals, by contending cries of supplication, defiance, and despair, its brightest beauties of Nature and Art appeared but to shine with an aspect of bitter mockery around the human misery which their splendor disclosed.

Upward of a hundred people--mostly of the lowest orders--were congregated before the senator's devoted dwelling. Some few among them passed slowly to and fro in the street, their figures gliding shadowy and solemn through the light around them; but the greater number lay on the pavement before the wall of Numerian's dwelling and the doorways of the lofty houses by its side. Illuminated by the full glare of the light from the palace windows, these groups, huddled together in the distorted attitudes of suffering and despair, assumed a fearful and unearthly appearance. Their shriveled faces, their tattered clothing, their wan forms, here prostrate, there half raised, were bathed in a steady red glow. High above them, at the windows of the tall houses, now tenanted in every floor by the dead, appeared a few figures (the mercenary guardians of the dying within) bending forward to look out upon the palace opposite--their haggard faces showing pale in the clear moonlight. Sometimes their voices were heard, calling in mockery to the mass of people below to break down the strong steel gates of the palace, and tear the full wine-cup from its master's lips. Sometimes those beneath replied with execrations, which rose wildly mingled with the wailing of women and children, the moans of the plague-stricken, and the supplications of the famished, to the slaves passing backward and forward behind the palace railings, for charity and help.

In the intervals, when the tumult of weak voices was partially lulled, there was heard a dull, regular, beating sound, produced by those who had found dry bones on their road to the palace, and were pounding them on the pavement, in sheltered places, for food. The wind, which had been refreshing during the day, had changed at sunset, and now swept up slowly over the street, in hot, faint gusts, plague-laden from the east. Particles of the ragged clothing on some prostrate forms lying most exposed in its course, waved slowly to and fro, as it passed, like banners planted by Death on the yielding defenses of the citadel of Life. It wound through the open windows of the palace, hot and mephitic, as if tainted with the breath of the foul and furious words which it bore onward into the banqueting-hall of the senator's reckless guests. Driven over such scenes as now spread beneath it, it derived from them a portentous significance--it seemed to blow like an atmosphere exuded from the furnace depths of center earth, breathing sinister warnings of some deadly convulsion in the whole fabric of Nature over the thronged and dismal street.

Such was the prospect before the palace, and such the spectators assembled in ferocious anxiety to behold the destruction of the senator's abode. Meanwhile, within the walls of the building, the beginning of the fatal orgy was at hand.

It had been covenanted by the slaves (who, during the calamities in the besieged city, had relaxed in their accustomed implicit obedience to their master with perfect impunity), that as soon as the last labors of preparation were completed, they should be free to consult their own safety by quitting the devoted palace. Already some of the weakest and most timid of their numbers might be seen passing out hastily into the gardens by the back gates, like engineers who had fired a train, and were escaping ere the explosion burst forth. Those among the menials who still remained in the palace were for the greater part occupied in drinking from the vases of wine which had been placed before them, to preserve to the last moment their failing strength.

The mockery of festivity had been extended even to their dresses--green liveries girt with cherry-colored girdles arrayed their wasted forms. They drank in utter silence. Not the slightest appearance of revelry or intoxication prevailed among their ranks. Confusedly huddled together, as if for mutual protection, they ever and anon cast quick glances of suspicion and apprehension upon some six or eight of the superior attendants of the palace, who walked backward and forward at the outer extremity of the hall occupied by their comrades, and occasionally advancing along the straight passages before them to the front gates of the building, appeared to be exchanging furtive signals with some of the people in the street. Reports had been vaguely spread of a secret conspiracy between some of the principal slaves and certain chosen ruffians of the populace, to murder all the inmates of the palace, seize on its treasures, and, opening the city gates to the Goths, escape with their booty during the confusion of the pillage of Rome. Nothing had as yet been positively discovered; but the few attendants who kept ominously apart from the rest were unanimously suspected by their fellows, who now watched them over their wine-cups with anxious eyes. Different as was the scene among the slaves still left in the palace from the scene among the people dispersed in the street, the one was nevertheless in its own degree as gloomily suggestive of some great impending calamity as the other.

The grand banqueting-hall of the palace, prepared though it now was for festivity, wore a changed and melancholy aspect.

The massive tables still ran down the whole length of the noble room, surrounded by luxurious couches, as in former days; but not a vestige of food appeared upon their glittering surfaces. Rich vases, flasks, and drinking-cups, all filled with wine, alone occupied the festal board. Above, hanging low from the ceiling, burned ten large lamps, corresponding to the number of guests assembled, as the only procurable representatives of the hundreds of revelers who had feasted at Vetranio's expense, during the brilliant nights that were now passed forever. At the lower end of the room, beyond the grand door of entrance, hung a thick black curtain, apparently intended to conceal, mysteriously, some object behind it. Before the curtain burned a small lamp of yellow glass, raised upon a high gilt pole, and around and beneath it, heaped against the side walls, and over part of the table, lay a various and confused mass of rich objects, all of a nature more or less inflammable, and all besprinkled with scented oils. Hundreds of yards of gorgeously variegated hangings, rolls upon rolls of manuscripts, gaudy dresses of all colors, toys, utensils, innumerable articles of furniture, formed in rare and beautifully inlaid woods, were carelessly flung together against the walls of the apartment, and rose high toward its ceiling.

On every part of the tables not occupied by the vases of wine were laid gold and jeweled ornaments, which dazzled the eye by their brilliancy; while, in extraordinary contrast to the magnificence thus profusely displayed, there appeared in one of the upper corners of the hall an old wooden stand, covered by a coarse cloth, on which were placed one or two common earthenware bowls, containing what may be termed a "mash" of boiled bran and salted horse flesh. Any repulsive odor which might have arisen from this strange compound was overpowered by the various perfumes sprinkled about the room, which, mingling with the hot breezes wafted through the windows from the street, produced an atmosphere as oppressive and debilitating, in spite of its artificial allurements to the sense of smell, as the air of a dungeon or the vapors of a marsh.

Remarkable as was the change in the present appearance of the banqueting-hall, it was but the feeble reflection of the alteration for the worse in the aspect of the host and his guests. Vetranio reclined at the head of the table, dressed in a scarlet mantle. An embroidered towel, with purple tassels and fringes, connected with rings of gold, fell over his breast, and silver and ivory bracelets were clasped round his arms. But of the former man the habiliments were all that remained. His head was bent forward as if with the weakness of age; his emaciated arms seemed barely able to support the weight of the ornaments which glittered on them; his eyes had contracted a wild, unsettled expression; and a deadly paleness overspread the once plump and jovial cheeks which so many mistresses had kissed, in mercenary rapture, in other days. Both in countenance and manner the elegant voluptuary of our former acquaintance at the Court of Ravenna was entirely and fatally changed. Of the other eight patricians who lay on the couches around their altered host--some wild and reckless, some gloomy and imbecile--all had suffered in the ordeal of the siege, the famine, and the pestilence, like him.

Such were the members of the assemblage, represented from the ceiling by nine of the burning lamps. The tenth and last lamp indicated the presence of one more guest, who reclined a little apart from the rest.

This man was humpbacked; his gaunt, bony features were repulsively disproportioned in size to his puny frame, which looked doubly contemptible, enveloped as it was in an ample tawdry robe. Sprung from the lowest ranks of the populace, he had gradually forced himself into the favor of his superiors by his skill in coarse mimicry, and his readiness in ministering to the worst vices of all who would employ him. Having lost the greater part of his patrons during the siege, finding himself abandoned to starvation on all sides, he had now, as a last resource, obtained permission to participate in the Banquet of Famine, to enliven it by a final exhibition of his buffoonery, and to die with his masters, as he had lived with them--the slave, the parasite, and the imitator of the lowest of their vices and the worst of their crimes.

At the commencement of the orgy, little was audible beyond the clash of the wine-cups, the low occasional whispering of the revelers, and the confused voices of the people without, floating through the window from the street. The desperate compact of the guests, now that its execution had actually begun, awed them at first, in spite of themselves. At length, when there was a lull of all sounds--when a temporary calm prevailed ever the noises outside--when the wine-cups were emptied, and left for a moment ere they were filled again--Vetranio feebly rose, and, announcing with a mocking smile that he was about to speak a funeral oration over his friends and himself, pointed to the wall immediately behind him, as to an object fitted to awaken the astonishment or the hilarity of his moody guests.

Against the upper part of the wall were fixed various small statues in bronze and marble, all representing the owner of the palace, and all hung with golden plates. Beneath these appeared the rent-roll of his estates, written in various colors, on white vellum; and beneath that, scratched on the marble in faint, irregular characters, was no less an object than his own epitaph, composed by himself. It may be translated thus:

"Behold"--cried Vetranio, pointing triumphantly to the epitaph--"behold in every line of those eloquent letters at once the seal of my resolute adherence to the engagement that unites us here, and the foundation of my just claim to the reverence of posterity on the most useful of the arts which I exercised for the benefit of my species! Read--friends, brethren, fellow-martyrs of glory--and, as you read, rejoice with me over the hour of our departure from the desecrated arena, no longer worthy the celebration of the Games of Life! Yet, ere the feast proceeds, hear me while I speak--I make my last oration, as the arbiter of our funeral sports, as the host of the Banquet of Famine!

"Who would sink ignobly beneath the slow superiority of starvation, or perish under the quickly-glancing steel of the barbarian conqueror's sword, when such a death as ours is offered to the choice?--when wine flows bright, to drown sensation in oblivion, and a palace and its treasures furnish alike the scene of the revel and the radiant funeral pile? The mighty philosophers of India--the inspired Gymnosophists--died as we shall din! Calanus before Alexander, Zamarus in the presence of Augustus, lit the fires that consumed them! Let us follow their glorious example! No worms will prey upon our bodies, no hired mourners will howl discordant at our funerals! Purified in the radiance of primeval fire, we shall vanish triumphant from enemies and friends--a marvel to the earth, a vision of glory to the gods themselves!

"Is it a day more or a day less of life that is now of importance to us? No; it is only toward the easiest and the noblest death that our aspirations can turn! Among our number, there is now not one whom the care of existence can further occupy!

"Here, at my right hand, reclines my estimable comrade of a thousand former feasts, Furius-Balburius-Placidus, who, when we sailed on the Lucrine Lake, was wont to complain of intolerable hardship if a fly settled on the gilded folds of his umbrella; who languished for a land of Cimmerian darkness if a sunbeam penetrated the silken awnings of his garden terrace; and who now wrangles for a mouthful of horseflesh with the meanest of his slaves, and would exchange the richest of his country villas for a basket of dirty bread! Oh, Furius-Balburius-Placidus, of what further use is life to thee?

"There, at my left, I discern the changed though still expressive countenance of the resolute Thascius--he who chastised a slave with a hundred lashes if his warm water was not brought immediately at his command; he whose serene contempt for every member of the human species but himself once ranked him among the greatest of human philosophers; even he now wanders through his palace unserved, and fawns upon the plebeian who will sell him a measure of wretched bran! Oh, admired friend, oh, rightly-reasoning Thascius, say, is there anything in Rome which should delay thee on thy journey to the Elysian Fields?

"Further onward at the table, drinking largely while I speak, I behold, oh, Marcus-Moecius-Moemmius, thy once plump and jovial form!--thou, in former days accustomed to rejoice in the length of thy name, because it enabled thy friends to drink the more in drinking a cup to each letter of it, tell me what banqueting-hall is now open to thee but this?--and thus desolate in the city of thy social triumphs, what should disincline thee to make of our festal solemnity thy last revel on earth?

"Thou, too, facetious hunchback, prince of parasites, unscrupulous Reburrus, where, but at this Banquet of Famine, will thy buffoonery now procure for thee a draught of reviving wine? Thy masters have abandoned thee to thy native dunghill! No more shalt thou wheedle for them when they borrow, or bully for them when they pay! No more charges of poisoning or magic shalt thou forge to imprison their troublesome creditors! Oh, officious sycophant, thy occupations are no more! Drink while thou canst, and then resign thy carcass to congenial mire!

"And you, my five remaining friends, whom--little desirous of further delay--I will collectively address, think on the days when the suspicion of an infectious malady in any one of your companions was sufficient to separate you from the dearest of them; when the slaves who came to you from their palaces underwent long ceremonies of ablution before they approached your presence; and, remembering this, reflect that most, perhaps all of us, now meet here plague-tainted already; and then say, of what ad vantage is it to languish for a life which is yours no longer?

"No, my friends, my brethren of the banquet; feeling that when life is worthless it is folly to live, you cannot shrink from the lofty resolution by which we are bound, you cannot pause on our joyful journey of departure from the scenes of earth--I wrong you even by a doubt! Let me now, rather, ask your attention for a worthier subject--the enumeration of the festal ceremonies by which the progress of the banquet will be marked. That task concluded, that last ceremony of my last welcome to you in these halls duly performed, I join you once more in your final homage to the deity of our social lives--the god of Wine!

"It is not unknown to you--learned as you are in the jovial antiquities of the table--that it was, among some of the ancients, a custom for a master-spirit of philosophy to preside---the teacher as well as the guest--at their feasts. This usage it has been my care to revive; and, as this our meeting is unparalleled in its heroic design, so it was my ambition to bid to it one unparalleled, either as a teacher or a guest. Fired by an original idea, unobserved of my slaves, aided only by my singing-boy, the faithful Glyco, I have succeeded in placing behind that black curtain such an associate of our revels as you have never feasted with before--whose appearance at the fitting moment must strike you irresistibly with astonishment; and whose discourse--not of human wisdom only--will be inspired by the midnight secrets of the tomb. By my side, on this parchment, lies the formulary of questions to be addressed by Reburrus, when the curtain is withdrawn, to the Oracle of the Mysteries of other Spheres.

"Before you, behold in those vases all that remains of my once well-stocked cellars; and all that is provided for the palates of my guests! We sit at the Banquet of Famine, and no coarser sustenance than inspiring wine finds admittance at the Bacchanalian board. Yet, should any among us, in his last moments, be feeble enough to pollute his lips with nourishment alone worthy of the vermin of the earth, let him seek the wretched and scanty table, type of the wretched and scanty food that covers it, placed yonder, in obscurity, behind me. There will he find (in all, barely sufficient for one man's poorest meal) the last morsels of the vilest nourishment left in the palace. For me, my resolution is fixed--it is only the generous wine-cup that shall now approach my lips!

"Above me are the ten lamps, answering to the number of my friends here assembled. One after another, as the wine overpowers us, those burning images of life will be extinguished in succession by the guests who remain proof against our draughts; and the last of these, lighting this torch at the last lamp, will consummate the banquet, and celebrate its glorious close, by firing the funeral pile of my treasures, heaped yonder against my palace walls! If my powers fail me before yours, swear to me that whoever among you is able to lift the cup to his lips, after it has dropped from the hands of the rest, will fire the pile! Swear it by your lost mistresses, your lost friends, your lost treasures!--by your own lives, devoted to the pleasures of wine and the purification of fire!"

As, with flashing eyes and flushed countenance, Vetranio sank back on his couch, companions, inflamed with the wine they had already drunk, arose, cup in hand, and turned toward him. Their voices, discordantly mingled, pronounced the oath together--then, as they resumed their former positions, their eyes all turned toward the black curtain in ardent expectation.

They had observed the sinister and sarcastic expression of Vetranio's eye, as he spoke of his concealed guest; they knew that the hunchback Reburrus possessed, among his other powers of buffoonery, the art of ventriloquism; and they suspected the presence of some hideous or grotesque image of a heathen god or demon in the hidden recess, which the jugglery of the parasite was to gift with the capacity of speech. Blasphemous comments upon life, death and immortality were eagerly awaited. The general impatience for the withdrawal of the curtain was perceived by Vetranio, who, waving his hand for silence, authoritatively exclaimed: "The hour has not yet arrived--more draughts must be drunk, more libations poured out, ere the mystery of the curtain is revealed! Ho! Glyco!"--he continued, turning toward the singing-boy, who had silently entered the room--"the moment is yours! Tune your lyre, and recite my last ode, which I have addressed to you! Let the charms of poetry preside over the feast of Death!"

The boy advanced trembling: his once ruddy face was colorless and haggard; his eyes were fixed with a look of rigid terror on the black curtain; his features palpably expressed the presence within him of some secret and overwhelming recollection, which had crushed all his other faculties and perceptions. Steadily, almost guiltily, averting his face from his master's countenance, he stood by Vetranio's couch, a frail and fallen being, a mournful spectacle of perverted docility and degraded youth.

Still true, however, to the duties of his vocation, he ran his thin, trembling fingers over the lyre, and mechanically preluded the commencement of the ode. But during the silence of attention which now prevailed, the confused noises from the people in the street penetrated more distinctly into the banqueting-room; and at this moment, high above them all--hoarse, raving, terrible--rose the voice of one man.

"Tell me not," he cried, "of perfumes wafted from the palace--foul vapors flow from it!--see, they sink, suffocating over me!--they bathe sky and earth, and men who move around us, in fierce, green light!"

Then other voices of men and women, shrill and savage, broke forth in interruption together--"Peace, Davus! you awake the dead about you!" "Hide in the darkness; you are plague-struck; your skin is shriveled; your gums are toothless!" "When the palace is fired, you shall be flung into the flames to purify your rotten carcass!"

"Sing!" cried Vetranio, furiously, observing the shudders that ran over the boy's frame and held him speechless. "Strike the lyre, as Timothetis struck it before Alexander! Drown in melody the barking of the curs who wait for our offal in the street!"

Feebly and interruptedly the terrified boy began, the wild continuous noises of the moaning voices from without sounding their awful accompaniment to the infidel philosophy of his song, as he breathed it forth in faint and faltering accents. It ran thus:

TO GLYCO.

Ah, Glycol? why in flow'rs array'd?
Those festive wreaths less quickly fade
Than briefly-blooming joy!
Those high-prized friends who share your mirth
Are counterfeits of brittle earth,
False coin'd in Death's alloy!

The bliss your notes could once inspire,
When lightly o'er the godlike lyre
Your nimble fingers pass'd,
Shall spring the same from others' skill--
When you're forgot, the music still
The player shall outlast!

The sun-touch'd cloud that mounts the sky,
That brightly glows to warm the eye,
Then fades we know not where,
Is image of the little breath
Of life--and then, the doom of Death
That you and I must share!

Helpless to make or mar our birth,
We blindly grope the ways of earth,
And live our paltry hour;
Sure, that when life has ceased to please,
To die at will, in Stoic ease,
Is yielded to our pow'r!

Who, timely wise, would meanly wait
The dull delay of tardy Fate,
When Life's delights are shorn?
No! When its outer gloss has flown,
Let's fling the tarnish'd bauble down
As lightly as 'twas worn!

"A health to Glyco! A deep draught to a singer from heaven come down upon earth!" cried the guests, seizing their wine-cups as the ode was concluded, and draining them to the last drop. But their drunken applause fell noiseless upon the ear to which it was addressed. The boy's voice, as he sang the final stanza of the ode, had suddenly changed to a shrill, almost an unearthly tone, then suddenly sank again as he breathed forth the last few notes; and now, as his dissolute audience turned toward him with approving glances, they saw him standing before them, cold, rigid, and voiceless. The next instant his fixed features were suddenly distorted; his whole frame collapsed, as if torn by an internal spasm--he fell back heavily to the floor. Those around approached him with unsteady feet, and raised him in their arms. His soul had burst the bonds of vice in which others had entangled it; the voice of Death had whispered to the slave of the great despot, Crime--"Be free!"

"We have heard the note of the swan singing its own funeral hymn!" said the patrician Placidus, looking in maudlin pity from the corpse of the boy to the face of Vetranio, which presented, for the moment, an involuntary expression of grief and remorse.

"Our miracle of beauty, and boy-god of melody, has departed before us to the Elysian Fields!" muttered the hunchback, Reburrus, in harsh, sarcastic accents.

Then, during the short silence that ensued, the voices from the street--joined on this occasion to a noise of approaching footsteps on the pavement--became again distinctly audible in the banqueting-hall. "News! news!" cried these fresh auxiliaries of the horde already assembled before the palace. "Keep together, you who still care for your lives! Solitary citizens have been lured by strange men into desolate streets, and never seen again! Jars of newly-salted flesh, which there were no beasts left in the city to supply, have been found in a butcher's shop! Keep together! Keep together!"

"No cannibals among the mob shall pollute the body of my poor boy!" cried Vetranio, rousing himself from his short lethargy of grief. "Ho! Thascius! Marcus! you who can yet stand! let us bear him to the funeral pile! He has died first--his ashes shall be first consumed!"

The two patricians arose as the senator spoke, and aided him in carrying the body to the lower end of the room, where it was laid across the table, beneath the black curtain, and between the heaps of drapery and furniture piled up against each of the walls. Then, as his guests reeled back to their places, Vetranio, remaining by the side of the corpse, and seizing in his unsteady hands a small vase of wine, exclaimed, in tones of fierce exultation: "The hour has come--the banquet of Famine has ended--the banquet of Death has begun! A health to the guest behind the curtain! Fill--drink--behold!"

He drank deeply from the vase as he ceased, and drew aside the black drapery above him. A cry of terror and astonishment burst from the intoxicated guests, as they beheld in the recess now disclosed to view the corpse of an aged woman, clothed in white, and propped up on a high black throne, with the face turned toward them, and the arms (artificially supported) stretched out as if in denunciation over the banqueting-table. The lamp of yellow glass which burned high above the body threw over it a lurid and flickering light--the eyes were open, the jaw had fallen, the long, gray tresses drooped heavily on either side of the white, hollow cheeks.

"Behold!"--cried Vetranio, pointing to the corpse--"behold my secret guest! Who so fit as the dead to preside at the banquet of Death? Compelling the aid of Glyco, shrouded by congenial night, seizing on the first corpse exposed before me in the street, I have set up there, unsuspected by all, the proper idol of our worship, and philosopher at our feast! Another health to the queen of the fatal revels--to the teacher of the mysteries of worlds unseen; rescued from rotting unburied, to perish in the consecrated flames with the senators of Rome! A health!--a health to the mighty mother, ere she begin the mystic revelations! Fill--drink!"

Fired by their host's example, recovered from their momentary awe, already inflamed by the mad recklessness of debauchery, the guests started from their couches, and with Bacchanalian shouts answered Vetranio's challenge. The scene at this moment approached the supernatural. The wild disorder of the richly-laden tables; the wine flowing over the floor from overthrown vases; the great lamps burning bright and steady over the confusion beneath; the fierce gestures, the disordered countenances of the revelers, as they waved their jeweled cups over their heads in frantic triumph; and then the gloomy and terrific prospect at the lower end of the hall--the black curtain, the light burning solitary on its high pole, the dead boy lying across the festal table, the living master standing by his side, and, like an evil spirit, pointing upward in mockery to the white-robed corpse of the woman as it towered above all in its unnatural position, with its skinny arms stretched forth, with its ghastly features appearing to move as the faint and flickering light played over them--produced together such a combination of scarce earthly objects as might be painted, but cannot be described. It was an embodiment of a sorcerer's vision--an apocalypse of sin triumphant over the world's last relics of mortality in the vaults of death.

"To your task, Reburrus!" cried Vetranio, when the tumult was lulled; "to your questions without delay! Behold the teacher with whom you are to hold commune! Peruse carefully the parchment in your hand--question, and question loudly--you speak to the apathetic dead!"

For some time before the disclosure of the corpse, the hunchback had been seated apart at the end of the banqueting-hall opposite the black-curtained recess, conning over the manuscript containing the list of questions and answers which formed the impious dialogue he was to hold, by the aid of his powers of ventriloquism, with the violated dead. When the curtain was withdrawn he had looked up for a moment, and had greeted the appearance of the sight behind it with a laugh of brutal derision, returning immediately to the study of his blasphemous formulary which had been confided to his care. At the moment when Vetranio's commands were addressed to him, he arose, reeled down the apartment toward the corpse, and, opening the dialogue as he approached it, began in loud, jeering tones, "Speak, miserable relict of decrepit mortality!"

He paused as he uttered the last word; and, gaining a point of view from which the light of the lamp fell full upon the solemn and stony features of the corpse, looked up defiantly at it. In an instant a frightful change passed over him, the manuscript dropped from his hand, his deformed frame shrank and tottered, a shrill cry of recognition burst from his lips, more like the yell of a wild beast than the voice of a man.

The next moment--when the guests started up to question or deride him--he turned slowly and faced them. Desperate and drunken as they were, his look awed them into utter silence. His face was deathlike in hue, as the face of the corpse above him--thick drops of perspiration trickled down it like rain--his dry, glaring eyes wandered fiercely over the startled countenances before him; and as he extended toward them his clinched hands, he muttered in a deep, gasping whisper, "Who has done this? MY MOTHER! MY MOTHER!"

As these few words--of awful import, though of simple form--fell upon the ears of those whom he addressed, such of them as were not already sunk in insensibility looked round on each other almost sobered for the moment, and all speechless alike. Not even the clash of the wine-cups was now heard at the banqueting-table--nothing was audible but the sound, still fitfully rising and falling, of the voices of terror, ribaldry, and anguish from the street; and the hoarse, convulsive accents of the hunchback, still uttering at intervals his fearful identification of the dead body above him--"MY MOTHER! MY MOTHER!"

At length Vetranio, who was the first to recover himself, addressed the terrified and degraded wretch before him, in tones which, in spite of himself, betrayed as he began an unwonted tremulousness and restraint. "What, Reburrus!" he cried, "are you already drunken to insanity, that you call the first dead body which by chance I encountered in the street, and by chance brought hither--your mother? Was it to talk of your mother, whom dead or alive we neither know nor care for, that you were admitted here? Son of obscurity and inheritor of rags, what are your plebeian parents to us?" he continued, refilling his cup, and lashing himself into assumed anger as he spoke. "To your dialogue without delay! or you shall be flung from the windows to mingle with your rabble-equals in the street!"

Neither by word nor look did the hunchback answer the senator's menaces. For him, the voice of the living was stifled in the presence of the dead. The retribution that had gone forth against him had struck his moral, as a thunderbolt might have stricken his physical, being. His soul strove in agony within him as he thought on the awful fatality which had set the dead mother in judgment on the degraded son--which had directed the hand of the senator unwittingly to select the corpse of the outraged parent, as the object for the infidel buffoonery of the reckless child, at the very close of his impious career. His past life rose before him, for the first time, like a foul vision--like a nightmare of horror, impurity, and crime. He staggered up the room, groping his way along the wall, as if the darkness of midnight had closed around his eyes, and crouched down by the open window. Beneath him rose the evil and ominous voices from the street; around him spread the pitiless array of his masters; before him appeared the denouncing vision of the corpse.

He would have remained but a short time unmolested in his place of refuge, but for an event which now diverted from him the attention of Vetranio and his guests. Drinking furiously to drown all recollection of the catastrophe they had just witnessed, three of the revelers had already suffered the worst consequences of an excess which their weakened frames were ill fitted to bear. One after another, at short intervals, they fell back senseless on their couches; and one after another, as they succumbed, the three lamps burning nearest to them were extinguished. The same speedy termination to the debauch seemed to be in reserve for the rest of their companions, with the exception of Vetranio and the two patricians who reclined at his right hand and his left. These three still preserved the appearance of self-possession; but an ominous change had already overspread their countenances. The expressions of wild joviality, of fierce recklessness, had departed from their wild features--they silently watched each other with vigilant and suspicious eyes--each, in turn, as he filled his winecup, significantly handled the torch with which the last drinker was to fire the funeral pile. As the numbers of their rivals decreased, and the flame of lamp after lamp was extinguished, the fatal contest for a suicide supremacy assumed a present and powerful interest, in which all other purposes and objects were forgotten. The corpse at the foot of the banqueting-table, and the wretch cowering in his misery at the window, were now alike unheeded. In the bewildered and brutalized minds of the guests one sensation alone remained--the intensity of expectation which precedes the result of a deadly strife.

But ere long--awakening the attention which otherwise never have been aroused--the voice of the hunchback was heard, as the spirit of repentance now moved within him, uttering, in wild, moaning tones, a strange confession of degradation and sin--addressed to none; proceeding, independent of consciousness or will, from the depths of his stricken soul. He half raised himself; and fixed his sunken eyes upon the dead body, as these words dropped from his lips: "It was the last time that I beheld her alive, when she approached me--lonely, and feeble, and poor--in the street; beseeching me to return to her in the days of her old age and her solitude; and to remember how she had loved me in my childhood for my very deformity, how she had watched me throughout the highways of Rome, that none should oppress or deride me! the tears ran down her cheeks; she knelt to me on the hard pavement! and I, who had deserted her for her poverty, to make myself a slave in palaces among the accursed rich, flung down money to her, as to a beggar who wearied me, and passed on! She died desolate! her body lay unburied, and I knew it not! The son who had abandoned the mother never saw her more, until she rose before him there--avenging, horrible, lifeless! a sight of death never to leave him! Woe, woe to the accursed in his deformity, and the accursed of his mother's corpse!"

He paused, and fell back again to the ground, groveling and speechless. The tyrannic Thascius, regarding him with a scowl of drunken wrath, seized an empty vase, and poising it in his unsteady hand, prepared to hurl it at the hunchback's prostrate form, when again a single cry--a woman's--rising above the increasing uproar in the street, rang shrill and startling through the banqueting-hall. The patrician suspended his purpose as he heard it, mechanically listening with the half-stupid, half-cunning attention of intoxication. "Help! help!" shrieked the voice beneath the palace windows, "he follows me still--he attacked my dead child in my arms! As I flung myself down upon it on the ground, I saw him watching his opportunity to drag it by the limbs from under me; famine and madness were in his eyes--I drove him back--I fled--he follows me still!--save us, save us!"

At this instant her voice was suddenly stifled in the sound of fierce cries and rushing footsteps, followed by an appalling noise of heavy blows, directed at several points, against the steel railings before the palace doors. Between the blows, which fell slowly and together at regular intervals, the infuriated wretches, whose last exertions of strength were strained to the utmost to deal them, could be heard shouting breathlessly to each other, "Strike harder, strike longer! the back gates are guarded against us by our comrades admitted to the pillage of the palace instead of us. You who would share the booty, strike firm! the stones are at your feet, the gates of entrance yield before you."

Meanwhile a confused sound of trampling foot-steps and contending voices became audible from the lower apartments of the palace. Doors were violently shut and opened--shouts and execrations echoed and re-echoed along the lofty stone passages leading from the slaves' waiting-rooms to the grand staircase; treachery betrayed itself as openly within the building, as violence still proclaimed itself in the assault on the gates outside. The chief slaves had not been suspected by their fellows without a cause; the bands of pillage and murder had been organized in the house of debauchery and death; the chosen adherents from the street had been secretly admitted through the garden gates, and had barred and guarded them against further intrusion--another doom than the doom they had impiously prepared for themselves was approaching the devoted senators, at the hands of the slaves whom they had oppressed, and the plebeians whom they had despised.

At the first sound of the assault without and the first intimation of the treachery within, Vetranio, Thascius, and Marcus started from their couches--the remainder of the guests, incapable either of thought or action, lay, in stupid insensibility, awaiting their fate. These three men alone comprehended the peril that threatened them; and, maddened with drink, defied, in their ferocious desperation, the death that was in store for them. "Hark! they approach, the rabble revolted from our rule," cried Vetranio, scornfully, "to take the lives that we despise and the treasures that we have resigned! The hour has come; I go to fire the pile that involves in one common destruction our assassins and ourselves!"

"Hold!" exclaimed Thascius, snatching the torch from his hand, "the entrance must first be defended, or, ere the flames are kindled, the slaves will be here! Whatever is movable--couches, tables, corpses--let us hurl them all against the door!"

As he spoke he rushed toward the black-curtained recess, to set the example to his companions by seizing the corpse of the woman; but he had not passed more than half the length of the apartment, when the hunchback, who had followed him unheeded, sprang upon him from behind, and, with a shrill cry, fastening his fingers on his throat, hurled him, torn and senseless, to the floor. "Who touches the body that is mine?" shrieked the deformed wretch, rising from his victim, and threatening with his blood-stained hands Vetranio and Marcus, as they stood bewildered, and uncertain for the moment whether first to avenge their comrade or to barricade the door. "The son shall rescue the mother! I go to bury her! Atonement! Atonement!"

He leaped upon the table as he spoke, tore asunder with resistless strength the cords which fastened the corpse to the throne, seized it in his arms, and the next instant gained the door. Uttering fierce, inarticulate cries, partly of anguish and partly of defiance, he threw it open, and stepped forward to descend, when he was met at the head of the stairs by the band of assassins hurrying up, with drawn swords and blazing torches, to their work of pillage and death. He stood before them--his deformed limbs set as firmly on the ground as if he were preparing to descend the stairs at one leap--with the corpse raised high on his breast; its unearthly features were turned toward them, its bare arms were still stretched forth as they had been extended over the banqueting-table, its gray hair streamed back and mingled with his own: under the fitful illumination of the torches, which played red and wild over him and his fearful burden, the dead and the living looked joined to each other in one monstrous form.

Huddled together, motionless, on the stairs, their shouts of vengeance and fury frozen on their lips, the assassins stood for one moment, staring mechanically, with fixed, spell-bound eyes, upon the hideous bulwark opposing their advance on the victims whom they had expected so easily to surprise--the next instant a superstitious panic seized them; as the hunchback suddenly moved toward them to descend, the corpse seemed to their terror-stricken eyes to be on the eve of bursting its way through their ranks. Ignorant of its introduction into the palace, imagining it, in the revival of their slavish fears, to be the spectral offspring of the magic incantations of the senators above, they turned with one accord and fled down the stairs. The sound of their cries of fear grew fainter and fainter in the direction of the garden as they hurried through the secret gates at the back of the building. Then the heavy, regular tramp of the hunchback's footsteps, as he paced the solitary corridors after them, bearing his burden of death, became audible in awful distinctness; then that sound also died away and was lost, and nothing more was heard in the banqueting-room save the sharp clang of the blows still dealt against the steel railings from the street.

But now these grew rare and more rare in their recurrence; the strong metal resisted triumphantly the utmost efforts of the exhausted rabble who assailed it; as the minutes moved on, the blows grew rapidly fainter and fewer; soon they diminished to three, struck at long intervals; soon to one, followed by deep execrations of despair; and after that a great silence sank down over the palace and the street, where such strife and confusion had startled the night echoes but a few moments before.

In the banqueting-hall this rapid succession of events--the marvels of a few minutes--passed before Vetranio and Marcus as visions beheld by their eyes, but neither contained nor comprehended by their minds. Stolid in their obstinate recklessness, stupefied by the spectacle of the startling perils--menacing yet harmless, terrifying though transitory--which surrounded them, neither of the senators moved a muscle or uttered a word, from the period when Thascius had fallen beneath the hunchback's attack to the period when the last blow against the palace railings, and the last sound of voices from the street, had ceased in silence. Then the wild current of drunken exultation, suspended within them during this brief interval, flowed once more, doubly fierce, in its old course. Insensible, the moment after they had passed away, to the warning and terrific scenes they had beheld, each now looked round on the other with a glance of triumphant levity. "Hark!" cried Vetranio, "the mob without, feeble and cowardly to the last, abandon their puny efforts to force my palace gates! Behold our banqueting-tables still sacred from the intrusion of the revolted menials, driven before my guest from the dead, like a flock of sheep before a single dog! Say, oh Marcus! did I not well to set the corpse at the foot of our banqueting-table? What marvels has it not effected, borne before us by the frantic Reburrus, as a banner of the hosts of death, against the cowardly slaves whose fit inheritance is oppression, and whose sole sensation is fear! See, we are free to continue and conclude the banquet as we had designed! The gods themselves have interfered to raise us in security above our fellow-mortals, whom we despise! Another health, in gratitude to our departed guest, the instrument of our deliverance, under the auspices of omnipotent Jove!"

As Vetranio spoke, Marcus alone, out of all the revelers, answered his challenge. These two--the last-remaining combatants of the strife--having drained their cups to the health proposed, passed slowly down each side of the room, looking contemptuously on their prostrate companions, and extinguishing every lamp but the two which burned over their own couches. Then returning to the upper end of the tables, they resumed their places, not to leave them again until the fatal rivalry was finally decided, and the moment of firing the pile had actually arrived.

The torch lay between them; the last vases of wine stood at their sides. Not a word escaped the lips of either to break the deep stillness prevailing over the palace. Each fixed his eyes on the other in stern and searching scrutiny, and, cup for cup, drank in slow and regular alternation. The debauch, which had hitherto presented a spectacle of brutal degradation and violence, now that it was restricted to two men only--each equally unimpressed by the scenes of horror he had beheld, each vying with the other for the attainment of the supreme of depravity--assumed an appearance of hardly human iniquity; it became a contest for a Satanic superiority of sin.

For some time, little alteration appeared in the countenances of either of the suicide rivals; but they had now drunk to that final point of excess at which wine either acts as its own antidote, or overwhelms in fatal suffocation the pulses of life. The crisis in the strife was approaching for both, and the first to experience it was Marcus. Vetranio, as he watched him, observed a dark purple flush overspreading his face, hitherto pale, almost colorless. His eyes suddenly dilated; he panted for breath. The vase of wine, when he strove with a last effort to fill his cup from it, rolled from his hand to the floor. The stare of death was in his face as he half raised himself, and for one instant looked steadily on his companion; the moment after, without word or groan, he dropped backward over his couch.

The contest of the night was decided! The host of the banquet and the master of the palace had been reserved to end the one, and to fire the other!

A smile of malignant triumph parted Vetranio's lips, as he now arose and extinguished the last lamp burning besides his own. That done, he grasped the torch. His eyes, as he raised it, wandered dreamily over the array of his treasures, and the forms of his dead or insensible fellow-patricians around him, to be consumed by his act in annihilating fire. The sensation of his solemn night-solitude in his fated palace began to work in vivid and varying impressions on his mind, which was partially recovering some portion of its wonted acuteness, under the bodily reaction now produced in him by the very extravagance of the night's excess. His memory began to retrace, confusedly, the scenes with which the dwelling that he was about to destroy had been connected, at distant or at recent periods. At one moment the pomp of former banquets, the jovial congregation of guests, since departed or dead, revived before him; at another, he seemed to be acting over again his secret departure from his dwelling on the night before his last feast, his stealthy return with the corpse that he had dragged from the street; his toil in setting it up in mockery behind the black curtain, and inventing the dialogue to be spoken before it by the hunchback. Now, his thoughts reverted to the minutest circumstances of the confusion and dismay among the members of his household, when, the first extremities of the famine began to be felt in the city; and now, without visible connection or cause, they turned suddenly to the morning when he had hurried through the most solitary paths in his grounds to meet the betrayer Ulpius, at Numerian's garden gate. Once more the image of Antonina--so often present to his imagination, since the original was lost to his eyes--grew palpable before him. He thought of her, as listening at his knees to the sound of his lute; as awakening, bewildered and terrified, in his arms; as flying distractedly before her father's wrath; as now too surely lying dead in her beauty and her innocence, amid the thousand victims of the famine and the plague.

These and other reflections, while they crowded in whirlwind rapidity on his mind, wrought no alteration in the deadly purpose which they suspended. His delay in lighting the torch was the unconscious delay of the suicide, secure in his resolution ere he lifts the poison to his lips--when Life rises before him as a thing that is past, and he stands for one tremendous moment in the dark gap between the present and the future--no more the pilgrim of Time--not yet the inheritor of Eternity!

So, in the dimly-lighted hall, surrounded by the victims whom he had hurried before him to their doom, stood the lonely master of the great palace; and so spoke within him the mysterious voices of his last earthly thoughts. Gradually they sank and ceased, and stillness and vacancy closed like dark veils over his mind. Starting, like one awakened from a trance, he once more felt the torch in his hand, and once more the expression of fierce desperation appeared in his eyes, as he lighted it steadily at the lamp above him.

The dew was falling pure to the polluted earth; the light breezes sang their low, daybreak anthem among the leaves to the Power that bade them forth; night had expired, and morning was already born of it, as Vetranio, with the burning torch in his hand, advanced toward the funeral pile.

He had already passed the greater part of the length of the room, when a faint sound of footsteps ascending a private staircase, which led to the palace gardens, and communicated with the lower end of the banqueting-hall by a small door of inlaid ivory, suddenly attracted his attention. He hesitated in his deadly purpose, listening to the slow, regular, approaching sound, which, feeble though it was, struck mysteriously impressive upon his ear, in the dreary silence of all things around him. Holding the torch high above his head, as the footsteps came nearer, he fixed his eyes in intense expectation upon the door. It opened, and the figure of a young girl clothed in white stood before him. One moment he looked upon her with startled eyes, the next the torch dropped from his hand and smoldered unheeded on the marble floor. It was Antonina.

Her face was overspread with a strange, transparent paleness; her once soft, round cheeks had lost their girlish beauty of form; her expression, ineffably mournful, hopeless, and subdued, threw a simple, spiritual solemnity over her whole aspect. She was changed, awfully changed, to the profligate senator, from the being of his former admiration; but still there remained in her despairing eyes enough of the old look of gentleness and patience, surviving through all anguish and dread, to connect her, even as she was now, with what she had been. She stood in the chamber of debauchery and suicide, between the funeral pile and the desperate man who was vowed to fire it, a feeble, helpless creature; yet powerful in the influence of her presence, at such a moment and in such a form, as a saving and reproving spirit, armed with the omnipotence of Heaven to mold the purposes of man.

Awed and astounded, as if he beheld an apparition from the tomb, Vetranio looked upon this young girl--whom he had loved with the least selfish passion that ever inspired him; whom he had lamented as long since lost and dead with the sincerest grief he had ever felt; whom he now saw standing before him, at the very moment ere he doomed himself to death, altered, desolate, supplicating--with emotions which held him speechless in wonder, and even in dread. While he still gazed upon her in silence, he heard her speaking to him in low, melancholy, imploring accents, which fell upon his ear, after the voices of terror and desperation that had risen around him throughout the night, hike tones never addressed to it before.

"Numerian, my father, is sinking under the famine," she began; "if no help is given to him, he may die even before sunrise! You are rich and powerful; I have come to you, having nothing now but his life to live for, to beg sustenance for him!" She paused, overpowered for the moment; and bent her eyes wistfully on the senator's face. Then, seeing that he vainly endeavored to answer her, her head drooped upon her breast, and her voice sank lower as she continued:

"I have striven for patience, under much sorrow and pain, through the long night that is passed; my eyes were heavy and my spirit was faint; I could have rendered up my soul willingly, in my loneliness and feebleness, to God who gave it; but that it was my duty to struggle for my life and my father's, now that I was restored to him after I had lost all besides! I could not think, or move, or weep, as, looking forth upon your palace, I watched and waited through the hours of darkness; but as morning dawned, the heaviness at my heart was lightened; I remembered that the palace I saw before me was yours; and though the gates were closed, I knew that I could reach it through your garden that joins to my father's hand. I had none in Rome to ask mercy of but you! so I set forth hastily, ere my weakness should overpower me; remembering that I had inherited much misery at your hands, but hoping that you might pity me for what I had suffered when you saw me again. I came wearily through the garden; it was long before I found my way hither; will you send me back as helpless as I came? You first taught me to disobey my father in giving me the lute; will you refuse to aid me in succoring him now? He is all that I have left in the world! Have mercy upon him!--have mercy upon me!"

Again she looked, up in Vetranio's face. His trembling lips moved, but still no sound came from them. The expression of confusion and awe yet prevailed over his features, as he pointed slowly toward the upper end of the banqueting-table. To her this simple action was eloquent beyond all power of speech; she turned her feeble steps instantly in the direction he had indicated.

He watched her, by the light of the single lamp that still burned, passing--strong in the shielding inspiration of her good purpose--amid the bodies of his suicide companions, without pausing on her way. Having gained the upper end of the room, she took from the table a flask of wine, and from the wooden stand behind it the bowl of offal disdained by the guests at the fatal banquet, returning immediately to the spot where Vetranio still stood. Here she stopped for a moment, as if about to speak once more; but her emotions overpowered her. From the sources which despair and suffering had dried up, the long-prisoned tears once more flowed forth at the bidding of gratitude and hope. She looked upon the senator, silent as himself; and her expression at that instant was destined to remain on his memory while memory survived. Then, with faltering and hasty steps, she departed by the way she had come; and in the great palace which his evil supremacy over the wills of others had made a hideous charnel-house, he was once more left alone.

He made no effort to follow or detain her as she left him. The torch still smoldered beside him on the floor, but he never stooped to take it up; he dropped down on a vacant couch, stupefied by what he had beheld. That which no entreaties, no threats, no fierce violence of opposition could have effected in him, the appearance of Antonina had produced; it had forced him to pause at the very moment of the execution of his deadly design.

He remembered how, from the very first day when he had seen her, she had mysteriously influenced the whole progress of his life; how his ardor to possess her had altered his occupations, and even interrupted his amusements; how all his energy and all his wealth had been baffled in the attempt to discover her, when she fled from her father's house; how the first feeling of remorse that he had ever known, had been awakened within him by his knowledge of the share he had had in producing her unhappy fate. Recalling all this; reflecting that had she approached him at an earlier period she would have been driven back affrighted by the drunken clamor of his companions, and had she arrived at a later, would have found his palace in flames; thinking at the same time of her sudden presence in the banqueting-hall, when he had believed her to be dead, when her appearance at the moment before he fired the pile was most irresistible in its supernatural influence over his actions--that vague feeling of superstitious dread which exists intuitively in all men's minds, which had never before been aroused in his, thrilled through him. His eyes were fixed on the door by which she had departed, as if he expected her to return. Her destiny seemed to be portentously mingled with his own; his life seemed to move, his death to wait, at her bidding. There was no repentance, no moral purification in the emotions which now suspended his bodily faculties in inaction; he was struck for the time with a mental paralysis.

The restless moments moved onward and onward, and still he delayed the consummation of the ruin which the night's debauch had begun. Slowly the tender daylight grew and brightened in its beauty, warmed the cold, prostrate bodies in the silent hall, and dimmed the faint glow of the wasting lamp; no black mist of smoke, no red glare of devouring fire arose to quench its fair luster; no roar of flames interrupted the murmuring morning tranquillity of nature, or startled from their heavy repose the exhausted outcasts stretched upon the pavement of the street. Still the noble palace stood unshaken on its firm foundations; still the adornments of its porticoes and its statues glittered as of old in the rays of the rising sun; and still the hand of the master who had sworn to destroy it, as he had sworn to destroy himself, hung idly near the torch which lay already extinguished in harmless ashes at his feet!

WE return to the street before the palace. The calamities of the siege had fallen fiercely on those who lay there during the night. From the turbulent and ferocious mob of a few hours since not even the sound of a voice was now heard. Some, surprised in a paroxysm of hunger by exhaustion and insensibility, lay with their hands half forced into their mouths, as if in their ravenous madness they had endeavored to prey upon their own flesh. Others now and then wearily opened their languid eyes upon the street, no longer regardful, in the present extremity of their sufferings, of the building whose destruction they had assembled to behold, but watching for a fancied realization of the visions of richly-spread tables and speedy relief called up before them, as if in mockery, by the delirium of starvation and disease.

The sun had as yet but slightly risen above the horizon, when the attention of the few among the populace who still preserved some perception of outward events was suddenly attracted by the appearance of an irregular procession--composed partly of citizens and partly of officers of the Senate, and headed by two men--which slowly approached from the end of the street leading into the interior of the city. This assembly of persons stopped opposite Vetranio's palace; and then, such members of the mob who watched them as were not yet entirely abandoned by hope, heard the inspiring news that the procession they beheld was a procession of peace, and that the two men who headed it were the Spaniard Basilius, a governor of a province, and Johannes, the chief of the imperial notaries--appointed embassadors to conclude a treaty with the Goths.

As this intelligence reached them, men who had before appeared incapable of the slightest movement now rose painfully, yet resolutely, to their feet, and crowded round the two embassadors as round two angels descended to deliver them from bondage and death. Meanwhile, some officers of the Senate, finding the front gates of the palace closed against them, proceeded to the garden entrances at the back of the building, to obtain admission to its owner. The absence of Vetranio and his friends from the deliberations of the Government, had been attributed to their disgust at the obstinate and unavailing resistance offered to the Goths. Now, therefore, when submission had been resolved upon, it had been thought both expedient and easy to recall them peremptorily to their duties. In addition to this motive for seeking the interior of the palace, the servants of the Senate had another errand to perform there. The widely-rumored determination of Vetranio and his associates to destroy themselves by fire, in the frenzy of a last debauch--disbelieved or disregarded while the more imminent perils of the city were under consideration--became a source of some apprehension and anxiety to the acting members of the Roman council, now that their minds were freed from part of the responsibility which had weighed on them, by their resolution to treat for peace.

Accordingly, the persons now sent into the palace were charged with the duty of frustrating its destruction, if such an act had been really contemplated, as well as the duty of recalling its inmates to their appointed places in the senate-house. How far they were enabled, at the time of their entrance into the banqueting-hall, to accomplish their double mission the reader is well able to calculate. They found Vetranio still in the place which he had occupied since Antonina had quitted him. Startled by their approach from the stupor which had hitherto weighed on his faculties, the desperation of his purpose returned; he made an effort to tear from its place the lamp which still feebly burned, and to fire the pile in defiance of all opposition. But his strength, already taxed to the utmost, failed him. Uttering impotent threats of resistance and revenge, he fell swooning and helpless into the arms of the officers of the Senate who held him back. One of them was immediately dismissed, while his companions remained in the palace, to communicate with the leaders of the assembly outside. His report concluded, the two embassadors moved slowly onward, separating themselves from the procession which had accompanied them, and followed only by a few chosen attendants--a mournful and a degraded embassy, sent forth by the people who had once imposed their dominion, their customs, and even their language, on the Eastern and Western worlds, to bargain with the barbarians whom their fathers had enslaved, for the purchase of a disgraceful peace.

On the departure of the embassadors, all the spectators still capable of the effort repaired to the Forum to await their return, and were joined there by members of the populace from other parts of the city. It was known that the first intimation of the result of the embassy would be given from this place; and in the eagerness of their anxiety to hear it, in the painful intensity of their final hopes of deliverance, even death itself seemed for a while to be arrested in its fatal progress through the ranks of the besieged. In silence and apprehension they counted the tardy moments of delay, and watched with sickening gaze the shadows lessening and lessening, as the sun gradually rose in the heavens to the meridian point.

At length, after an absence that appeared of endless duration, the two embassadors re-entered Rome. Neither of them spoke as they hurriedly passed through the ranks of the people; but their looks of terror and despair were all-eloquent to every beholder--their mission had failed.

For some time, no member of the Government appeared to have resolution enough to come forward and harangue the people on the subject of the unsuccessful embassy. After a long interval, however, the Prefect Ponipeianus himself, urged partly by the selfish entreaties of his friends, and partly by the childish love of display which still adhered to him through all his present anxieties and apprehensions, stepped into one of the lower balconies of the senate-house to address the citizens beneath him.

The chief magistrate of Rome was no longer the pompous and portly personage whose intrusion on Vetranio's privacy during the commencement of the siege has been described previously. The little superfluous flesh still remaining on his face hung about it like an ill-fitting garment; his tones had become lachrymose; the oratorical gestures with which he was wont to embellish profusely his former speeches were all abandoned; nothing remained of the original man but the bombast of his language and the impudent complacency of his self-applause, which now appeared in contemptible contrast to his crestfallen demeanor, and his disheartening narrative of degradation and defeat.

"Men of Rome, let each of you exercise in his own person the heroic virtues of a Regulus or a Cato!" the prefect began. "A treaty with the barbarians is out of our power! it is the scourge of the empire, Alaric himself, who commands the invading forces! Vain were the dignified remonstrances of the grave Basilius, futile was the persuasive rhetoric of the astute Johannes, addressed to the slaughtering and vainglorious Goth! On their admission to his presence, the embassadors, anxious to awe him into a capitulation, enlarged, with sagacious and commendable patriotism, on the expertness of the Romans in the use of arms, their readiness for war, and their vast numbers within the city walls. I blush to repeat the barbarian's reply. Laughing immoderately, he answered, 'The thicker the grass, the easier it is to cut!' Still undismayed. the embassadors, changing their tactics, talked indulgently of their willingness to purchase a peace. At this proposal, his insolence burst beyond all bounds of barbarous arrogance. 'I will not relinquish the siege,' he cried, 'until I have delivered to me all the gold and silver in the city, all the household goods in it, and all the slaves from the northern countries. 'What then, oh King, will you leave us?' asked our amazed embassadors. 'YOUR LIVES!' answered the implacable Goth. Hearing this, even the resolute Basilius and the wise Johannes despaired. They asked time to communicate with the Senate, and left the camp of the enemy without further delay. Such was the end of the embassy; such the arrogant ferocity of the barbarian foe!"

Here the prefect paused, from sheer weakness and want of breath. His oration, however, was not concluded. He had disheartened the people by his narrative of what had occurred to the embassadors; he now proceeded to console them by his relation of what had occurred to himself, when, after an interval, he thus resumed:

"But even yet, oh, citizens of Rome, it is not time to despair! There is another chance of deliverance still left to us; and that chance has been discovered by me. It was my lot, during the absence of the embassadors, to meet with certain men of Tuscany, who had entered Rome a few days before the beginning of the siege, and who spoke of a project for relieving the city which they would communicate to the prefect alone. Ever anxious for the public welfare, daring all treachery from strangers for advantage of my office, I accorded to these men a secret interview. They told me of a startling and miraculous event. The town of Neveia, lying, as you well know, in the direct road of the barbarians when they marched upon Rome, was protected from their pillaging bands by a tempest of thunder and lightning terrible to behold. This tempest arose not, as you may suppose, from an accidental convulsion of the elements, but was launched over the heads of the invaders by the express interference of the tutelary deities of the town, invocated by the inhabitants, who returned in their danger to the practice of their ancient manner of worship. So said the men of Tuscany; and such pious resources as those employed by the people of Neveia did they recommend to the people of Rome! For my part, I acknowledge to you that I have faith in their project. The antiquity of our former worship is still venerable in my eyes. The prayers of the priests of our new religion have wrought no miraculous interference in our behalf; let us, therefore, imitate the example of the inhabitants of Neveia, and by the force of our invocations hurl the thunders of Jupiter on the barbarian camp! Let us trust for deliverance to the potent interposition of the gods whom our fathers worshiped--those gods who now, perhaps, avenge themselves for our desertion of their temples by our present calamities. I go without delay to propose to the Bishop Innocentius and to the Senate the public performance of solemn ceremonies of sacrifice at the Capitol! I leave you in the joyful assurance that the gods, appeased by our returning fidelity to our altars, will not refuse the supernatural protection which they accorded to the people of a provincial town, to the citizens of Rome!"

No sounds either of applause or disapprobation followed the prefect's notable proposal for delivering the city from the besiegers by the public apostasy of the besieged. As he disappeared from their eyes, the audience turned away speechless. A universal despair now overpowered in them even the last energies of discord and crime; they resigned themselves to their doom with the gloomy indifference of beings in whom all mortal sensations, all human passions, good or evil, were extinguished. The prefect departed on his ill-omened expedition to propose the practice of Paganism to the bishop of a Christian church; but no profitable effort for relief was even suggested, either by the Government or the people.

And so this day drew in its turn toward a close--more mournful and more disastrous, more fraught with peril, misery and gloom than the days that had preceded it.

The next morning dawned, but no preparations for the ceremonies of the ancient worship appeared at the Capitol. The Senate and the bishop hesitated to incur the responsibility of authorizing a public restoration of Paganism; the citizens, hopeless of succor, heavenly or earthly, remained unheedful as the dead of all that passed around them. There was one man in Rome who might have succeeded in rousing their languid energies to apostasy: but where, and how, employed was he?

Now, when the opportunity for which he had labored resolutely, though in vain, through a long existence of suffering, degradation, and crime, had gratuitously presented itself more tempting and more favorable than even he in his wildest visions of success had ever dared to hope--where was Ulpius? Hidden from men's eyes, like a foul reptile, in his lurking-place in the deserted temple--now raving round his idols in the fury of madness, now prostrate before them in idiot adoration--weaker for the interests of his worship, at the crisis of its fate, than the weakest child crawling famished through the streets--the victim of his own evil machinations at the very moment when they might have led him to triumph--the object of that worst earthly retribution, by which the wicked are at once thwarted, doomed, and punished, here as hereafter, through the agency of their own sins.

Three more days passed. The Senate, their numbers fast diminishing in the pestilence, occupied the time in vain deliberations or moody silence. Each morning the weary guards looked forth from the ramparts, with the fruitless hope of discerning the long-promised legions of Ravenna on their way to Rome; and each morning devastation and death gained ground afresh among the hapless besieged. At length, on the fourth day, the Senate abandoned all hope of further resistance, and determined on submission, whatever might be the result. It was resolved that another embassy composed of the whole acting Senate, and followed by a considerable train, should proceed to Alaric: that one more effort should be made to induce him to abate his ruinous demands on the conquered; and that if this failed, the gates should be thrown open, and the city and the people abandoned to his mercy in despair.

As soon as the procession of this last Roman embassy was formed in the Forum, its numbers were almost immediately swelled, in spite of opposition, by those among the mass of the people who were still able to move their languid and diseased bodies, and who, in the extremity of their misery had determined, at all hazards, to take advantage of the opening of the gates, and fly from the city of pestilence, in which they were immured, careless whether they perished on the swords of the Goths or languished unaided on the open plains. All power of enforcing order had long since been lost; the few soldiers gathered about the senators made one abortive effort to drive the people back, and then resigned any further resistance to their will.

Feebly and silently the spirit-broken assembly now moved along the great highways, so often trodden to the roar of martial music and the shouts of applauding multitudes, by the triumphal processions of victorious Rome; and from every street, as it passed on, the wasted forms of the people stole out like specters to join it. Among these, as the embassy approached the Pincian Gate, were two, hurrying forth to herd with their fellow-sufferers, on whose fortunes in the fallen city our more particular attention has been fixed. To explain their presence on the scene (if such an explanation be required), it is necessary to digress for a moment from the progress of events during the last days of the siege to the morning when Antonina departed from Vetranio's palace to return with her succor of food and wine to her father's house.

The reader is already acquainted, from her own short and simple narrative, with the history of the closing hours of her mournful night-vigil by the side of her sinking parent, and with the motives which prompted her to seek the palace of the senator, and entreat assistance in despair from one whom she only remembered as the profligate destroyer of her tranquillity under her father's roof. It is now, therefore, most fitting to follow her on her way back through the palace gardens. No living creature but herself trod the grassy paths, along which she hastened with faltering steps--those paths which she dimly remembered to have first explored, when in former days she ventured forth to follow the distant sounds of Vetranio's lute. In spite of her vague, heavy sensations of solitude and grief, this recollection remained painfully present to her mind, unaccountably mingled with the dark and dreary apprehensions which filled her heart as she hurried onward, until she once more entered her father's dwelling; and then, as she again approached his couch, every other feeling became absorbed in a faint, overpowering fear, lest after all her perseverance and success in her errand of filial devotion, she might have returned too late.

The old man still lived--his weary eyes opened gladly on her, when she aroused him to partake of the treasured gifts from the senator's banqueting-table. The wretched food which the suicide-guests had disdained, and the simple flask of wine which they would have carelessly quaffed at one draught, were viewed both by parent and child as the saving and invigorating sustenance of many days. After having consumed as much as they dared of their precarious supply, the remainder was carefully husbanded. It was the last sign and promise of life to which they looked--the humble, yet precious store, in which alone they beheld the earnest of their security, for a few days longer, from the pangs of famine and the separation of death.

And now, with their small provision of food and wine set like a beacon of safety before their sight, a deep dream-like serenity--the sleep of the oppressed and wearied faculties--arose over their minds. Under its mysterious and tranquilizing influence, all impressions of the gloom and misery in the city, of the fatal evidences around them of the duration of the siege, faded away before their perceptions as dim, retiring objects w