clothed in white, and propped up on a high apartment toward the corpse, and opening the thek throne, with the face turned toward them, dialogue as he approached it, began in loud jer.and the arms (artificially supported) stretched ing tones:- Speak, miserable relic of decrepid at as if in denunciation over the banqueting mortality!" table. The lamp of yellow glass which burnt 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.

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, and 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.

"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 idel of our worship, and philosopher at our feast! Another health to the queen of the fatal revels-to the teacher His face was deathlike in hue, as the face of the 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! Fi! drink!"

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!"

Fired by their host's e ample, recovered from their momentary awe, already inflamed by the mad recklessness of debauchery, the guests start- As these few words of awful import, though ed from their couches, and with Bacchanalian of simple form-fell upon the ears of those whom shouts answered Vetranio's challenge. The he addressed, such of them as were not already scene at this moment approached the super- sunk in insensibility, looked round on each other natural. The wild disorder of the richly laden almost sobered for the moment, and all speechtables; the wine flowing over the floor from less alike. Not even the clash of the wine-cups overthrown vases; the great lamps burning was now heard at the banqueting table—nothing bright and steady over the confusion beneath; was audible but the sound, still fitfully rising and the fierce gestures, the disordered countenances falling, of the voices of terror, ribaldry, and anof the revelers, as they waved their jeweled guish, from the street; and the hoarse convulsive cups over their heads in frantic triumph; and accents of the hunchback, still uttering at interthen, the gloomy and terrific prospect at the vals his fearful identification of the dead body lower end of the hall-the black curtain, the above him-"MY MOTHER! MY MOTHER!" light burning solitary on its high pole, the dead At length Vetranio, who was the first to boy lying across the festal table, the living recover himself, addressed the terrified and demaster standing by his side, and, like an evil graded wretch before him, in tones which, spite spirit, pointing upward in mockery to the white-of himself, betrayed, as he began, an unwonted robed corpse of the woman, as it towered above tremulousness and restraint. What, Reburall in its unnatural position, with its skinny rus!" he cried, "are you already drunken to arms stretched forth, with its ghastly features insanity, that you call the first dead body which appearing to move as the faint and flickering by chance I encountered in the street, and by 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 triumphing 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!"

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chance brought hither-your mother? Was it to talk of your mother, whom dead or alive we neither know or 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 For some time before the disclosure of the voice of the living was stifled in the presence of corpse, the hunchback had been seated apart at the dead. The retribution that had gone forth the end of the banqueting-hall opposite the against him had struck his moral, as a thunderblack-curtained recess, conning over the manu- bolt might have stricken his physical, being. script containing the list of questions and answers His soul strove in agony within him, as he which formed the impious dialogue he was to thought on the awful fatality which had set the hold, by the aid of his powers of ventriloquism, dead mother in judgment on the degraded sonwith the violated dead. When the curtain was which had directed the hand of the senator, unwithdrawn he had looked up for a moment, and wittingly, to select the corpse of the outraged had greeted the appearance of the sight behind parent, as the object for the infidel buffoonery of it, with a laugh of brutal derision, returning im- the reckless child, at the very close of his im mediately to the study of the blasphemous for- pious career. His past life rose before him, for mulary which had been confided to his care. At the first time, like a foul vision; like a night. the moment when Vetranio's commands were mare of horror, impurity, and crime. He stag addressed to him, he rose, reeled down the gered up the room, groping his way along the

wall. as if the darkness of midnight had closed He paused, and fell back again to the ground, round 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 but 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 At this instant her voice was suddenly stifled of their companions, with the exception of Ve- in the sound of fierce cries and rushing footsteps, tranio and the two patricians who reclined at his followed by an appalling noise of heavy blows, right hand and his left. These three still pre-directed at several points, against the steel railserved the appearance of self-possession; but an ings before the palace doors. Between the ominous change had already overspread their blows, which fell slowly and together at regular countenances. The expression of wild joviality, intervals, the infuriated wretches, whose last of fierce recklessness, had departed from their exertions of strength were strained to the utmost features they silently watched each other with to deal them, could be heard shouting breathlessvigilant and suspicious eyes-each, in turn, as he filled his wine-cup, significantly handled the torch with which the last drinker was to fire the funeral pile. As the number 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.

groveling and speechless. The tyrannic Thas cius, 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 !"

ly to each other, "Strike harder, strike longer! the back gates are guarded against us by ou 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 !

gaarded 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.

Meanwhile a confused sound of trampling feet and contending voices became audible from the lower apartments of the palace. Doors were violently shut and opened-shouts and execrations echoed and reechoed 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 outBut ere long-awakening the attention which side. The chief slaves had not been suspected might otherwise never have been aroused-the by their fellows without a cause; the bands of voice of the hunchback was heard, as the spirit pillage and murder had been organized in the of repentance now moved within him, uttering, house of debauchery and death; the chosen adin wild moaning tones, a strange confession of de- herents from the street had been secretly admitgradation and sin-addressed to none, proceed-ted through the garden gates, and had barred and ing, 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 At the first sound of the assault without and her in the days of her old age and her solitude; the first intimation of the treachery within, and to remember how she had loved me in my Vetranio, Thascius, and Marcus started from their childhood for my very deformity, how she had couches-the remainder of the guests, incapable watched me throughout the highways of Rome, either of thought or action, lay, in stupid insensithat none should oppress, or deride me! the tears bility, awaiting their fate. These three men ran down her cheeks; she knelt to me on the alone comprehended the peril that threatened hard pavement! and I, who had deserted her for them; and, maddened with drink, defied, in their her poverty, to make myself a slave in palaces ferocious desperation, the death that was in store among the accursed rich, flung down money to for them. "Hark! they approach, the rabble re her, as to a beggar who wearied me; and volted from our rule," cried Vetranio, scornfully passed on! She died desolate! her body lay un-" to take the lives that we despise, and the trea buried, and I knew it not! The son who had sures that we have resigned! The hour has abandoned the mother never saw her more, until come; I go to fire the pile that involves in one she rose before him there-avenging, horrible, common destruction our assassins and our-lifeless', sight of death never to leave him! selves !" Woe, w o the accursed in his deformity, and the ac. of his mother's corpse !"

"Hold!" exclaimed Thascius, snatching the torch from his hand. "the entrance must first be

detended, or, ere the flames are kindled, the slaves will be here! Whatever is movable; auches, tables, corpses; let us hurl them all against the door!"

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.

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 In the banqueting hall this rapid succession of apartment when the hunchback, who had follow-events-the marvels of a few minutes-passed ed him unheeded, sprang upon him from behind, before Vetranio and Marcus as visions beheld by and, with a shrill cry, fastening his fingers on his their eyes, but neither contained nor comprethroat, hurled him torn and senseless to the floor. hended by their minds. Stolid in their obstinate "Who touches the body that is mine!" shrieked recklessness, stupefied by the spectacle of the the deformed wretch, rising from his victim, and startling perils-menacing yet harmless, terrifythreatening with his blood-stained hands Vetra- ing though transitory-which surrounded them, nio and Marcus, as they stood bewildered, and neither of the senators moved a muscle, or uttered uncertain for the moment whether first to avenge a word, from the period when Thascius had fallen their comrade, or to barricade the door-"The beneath the hunchback's attack, to the period son shall rescue the mother! I go to bury her! when the last blow against the palace railings Atonement! Atonement !" 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 waining 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!"

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.

As Vetranio spoke, Marcus alone, out of all the revelers, answered his challenge. These twothe last-remaining combatants of the strifehaving 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 burnt 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.

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 The torch lay between them; the last vases of gates at the back of the building. Then the wine stood at their sides. Not a word escaped heavy, regular tramp of the hunchback's foot- the lips of either, to break the deep stillness yet steps, as he paced the solitary corridors after prevailing over the palace. Each fixed his eyes them, bearing his burden of death, became audible on the other, in stern and searching scrutiny, and, in awful distinctness; then that sound also died cup for cup, drank in slow and regular alternation. away and was lost, and nothing more was heard The debauch, which had hitherto presented a in the banqueting room save the sharp clang of spectacle of brutal degradation and violence, now the blows still dealt against the steel railings that it was restricted to two men only-each from the street. equally unimpressed by the scenes of horror he But now these grew rare and more rare in had beheld, each vying with the other for the their recurrence; the strong metal resisted tri- attainment of the supreme of depravity-assumed umphantly the utmost efforts of the exhausted an appearance of hardly human iniquity; it rabble who assailed it; as the minutes moved on, became a contest for a satanic superiority of siu

For some time, little alteration appeared in the in the dark gap between the present and the countenances of either of the suicide-rivals; but future,-no more the pilgrim of Time-not yet they had now drunk to that final point of excess the inheritor of Eternity! at which wine either acts as its own antidote, or So, in the dimly-lighted hall, surrounded by overwhelms in fatal suffocation the pulses of life. the victims whom he had hurried before him to The crisis in the strife was approaching for both, their doom, stood the lonely master of the great and the first to experience it was Marcus. Ve- palace; and so spoke within him the mysterious tranio, as he watched him, observed a dark purple voices of his last earthly thoughts. Gradually flush overspreading his face, hitherto pale, almost they sank and ceased, and stillness and vacancy colorless. His eyes suddenly dilated; he panted closed like dark vails over his mind. Starting for breath. The vase of wine, when he strove like one awakened from a trance, he once more with a last effort to fill his cup from it, rolled felt the torch in his hand, and once more the from his hand to the floor. The stare of death expression of fierce desperation appeared in his was in his face as he half-raised himself, and for eyes, as he lit it steadily at the lamp above one instant looked steadily on his companion; the him. 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!

The dew was falling pure to the polluted earth; the light breezes sang their low, daybreak anthem among the leaves, to the Power that bid 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.

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 th door. It opened, and the figure of a young gir clothed in white stood before him. One momen he looked upon her with startled eyes, the next the torch dropped from his hand, and smouldered unheeded on the marble floor. It was Antonina.

A smile of malignant triumph parted Vetranio's lips, as he now arose and extinguished the last He had already passed the greater part of the lamp burning besides his own. That done, he length of the room, when a faint sound of footgrasped the torch. His eyes, as he raised it, wan- steps ascending a private staircase, which led to dered dreamily over the array of his treasures, and the palace gardens, and communicated with the the forms of his dead or insensible fellow-patri- lower end of the banqueting-hall by a small door cians around him, to be consumed by his act in of inlaid ivory, suddenly attracted his attention. annihilating fire. The sensation of his solemn He hesitated in his deadly purpose, listening to 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.

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 These and other reflections, while they crowded the sincerest grief he had ever felt; whom he in whirlwind rapidity on his mind, wrought no now saw standing before him, at the very moalteration in the deadly purpose which they sus- ment ere he doomed himself to death, altered, pended. His delay in lighting the torch was the desolate, supplicating-with the emotions which unconscious delay of the suicide, secure in his held him speechless in wonder, and even in resolution ere he lifts the poison to his lips,- dread. While he still gazed upon her in silence, when Life rises before him as a thing that is he heard her speaking to him in low, melanpest, and he stands for one tremendous moment choly imploring accents, which fell upon his

ear, after the voices of terror and desperation had made a hideous (harnel-house, he was once which had arisen around him throughout the more left alone. night, like tones never addressed to it before.

He made no effort to follow or detain her as Numerian, my father, is sinking under the she left him. The torch still smouldered beside famine;" she began, "if no help is given to him, him on the floor, but he never stooped to take it he may die even before sunrise! You are rich up; he dropped down on a vacant couch, stupefied 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:

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 first day when he had seen her, she had mysteriously influenced I have striven for patience, under much sor- the whole progress of his life; how his ardor to row and pain, through the long night that is possess her had altered his occupations, and even passed; my eyes were heavy and my spirit was interrupted his amusements; how all his energy faint; I could have rendered up my soul willing- and all his wealth had been baffled in the atly, in my loneliness and feebleness, to God who tempt to discover her, when she fled from her fagave it; but that it was my duty to struggle for ther's house; how the first feelings of remorse my life and my father's, now that I was restored that he had ever known, had been awakened to him after I had lost all beside! I could not within him, by his knowledge of the share he think, or move, or weep; as, looking forth upon had had in producing her unhappy fate. Recallyour palace, I watched and waited through the ing all this; reflecting that, had she approached hours of darkness; but as morning dawned, the him at an earlier period, she would have been heaviness at my heart was lightened; I remem-driven back affrighted by the drunken clamor o bered that the palace I saw before me was his companions; and had she arrived at a later, yours; and though the gates were closed, I would have found his palace in flames; thinking knew that I could reach it through your garden at the same time of her sudden presence in the that joins to my father's land. I had none in banqueting-hall, when he had believed her to be Rome to ask mercy of but you! so I set forth dead, when her appearance the moment before he hastily, ere my weakness should overpower me; fired the pile was most irresistible in its supernaremembering that I had inherited much misery tural influence over his actions-that vague feelat your hands, but hoping that you might pity ing of superstitious dread which exists intuitively me for what I had suffered when you saw me in all men's minds, which had never before been again. I came warily through the garden; it aroused in his-thrilled through him. His eyes was long before I found my way hither; will were fixed on the door by which she had departyou send me back as helpless as I came? You ed, as if he expected her to return. Her destiny first taught me to disobey my father in giving seemed to be portentously mingled with his own, me the lute; will you refuse to aid me in succor- his life seemed to move, his death to wait, at hei ing him now? He is all that I have left in the bidding. There was no repentance, no moral world! Have mercy upon him!-have mercy purification in the emotions which now suspended his bodily faculties in inaction; he was struck upon me!" for the time with a mental paralysis.

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 still 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.

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 He watched her, by the light of the single luster; no roar of flames interrupted the murlamp that still burnt, passing-strong in the muring morning tranquillity of nature, or startled shielding inspiration of her good purpose-amid from their heavy repose the exhausted outcasts the bodies of his suicide companions, without stretched upon the pavement of the street. Still pausing in her path. Having gained the upper the noble palace stood unshaken on its firm founend of the room, she took from the table a flask dations; still the adornments of its porticoes and of wine; and from the wooden stand behind it, its statues glittered as of old in the rays of the the bowl of offal disdained by the guests at the rising sun; and still the hand of the master who fatal banquet, returning immediately to the spot had sworn to destroy it, as he had sworn to dewhere Vetranio still stood. Here she stopped stroy himself, hung idly near the torch which lay for a moment, as if about to speak once more; already extinguished in harmless ashes at his but her emotions overpowered her. From the feet! 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

CHAPTER IV.

THE LAST EFFORTS OF THE BESIEGED.

WE return to the street before the palace. The calamities of the siege had fallen fiercely on those