! it was the most beautiful and the most beloved! What the
priests say that God should be to us, that, the fairest one of my
offspring, was to me! As I saw it mutilated and dead--I, who but an
hour before had hushed it on my bosom to rest!--my courage forsook me,
and when the murderers advanced on me I staggered and fell. I felt the
sword-point enter my neck; I saw the dagger gleam over the child in my
arms; I heard the death-shriek of the last victim above; and then my
senses failed me, and I could listen and move no more!

'Long must I have lain motionless at the foot of those fatal stairs;
for when I awoke from my trance the noises in the city were hushed, and
from her place in the firmament the moon shone softly into the deserted
house. I listened, to be certain that I was alone with my murdered
children. No sound was in the dwelling; the assassins had departed,
believing that their labour of blood was ended when I fell beneath
their swords; and I was able to crawl forth in security, and to look my
last upon my offspring that the Romans had slain. The child that I
held to my breast still breathed. I stanched with some fragments of my
garment the wounds that he had received, and laying him gently by the
stairs--in the moonlight, so that I might see him when he moved--I
groped in the shadow of the wall for my first murdered and my last
born; for that youngest and fairest one of my offspring whom they had
slaughtered before my eyes! When I touched the corpse, it was wet with
blood; I felt its face, and it was cold beneath my hands; I raised its
body in my arms, and its limbs already were rigid in death! Then I
thought of the eldest child, who lay dead in the chamber above. But my
strength was failing me fast. I had an infant who might yet be
preserved; and I knew that if morning dawned on me in the house, all
chances of escape were lost for ever. So, though my heart was cold
within me at leaving my child's corpse to the mercy of the Romans, I
took up the dead and the wounded one in my arms, and went forth into
the garden, and thence towards the seaward quarter of the town.

'I passed through the forsaken streets. Sometimes I stumbled against
the body of a child--sometimes the moonlight showed me the death-pale
face of some woman of my nation whom I had loved, stretched upward to
the sky; but I still advanced until I gained the wall of the town, and
heard on the other side the waters of the river running