hrough the hole whence, reptile-like, you
emerged!--and feed your starving citizens with the words you have heard
in the barbarian's tent!'

The guard approached, led him from the presence of the king, issued the
necessary directions to the sentinels, and left him to himself. Once
he raised his eyes in despairing appeal to the heaven that frowned over
his head; but still, no word, or tear, or groan, escaped him. He moved
slowly on through the thick darkness; and turning his back on the city,
passed, careless whither he strayed, into the streets of the desolate
and dispeopled suburbs.

CHAPTER 16.

LOVE MEETINGS.

Who that has looked on a threatening and tempestuous sky, has not felt
the pleasure of discovering unexpectedly a small spot of serene blue,
still shining among the stormy clouds? The more unwillingly the eye
has wandered over the gloomy expanse of the rest of the firmament, the
more gladly does it finally rest on the little oasis of light which
meets at length its weary gaze, and which, when it was dispersed over
the whole heaven, was perhaps only briefly regarded with a careless
glance. Contrasted with the dark and mournful hues around it, even that
small spot of blue gradually acquires the power of investing the wider
and sadder prospect with a certain interest and animation that it did
not before possess--until the mind recognises in the surrounding
atmosphere of storm an object adding variety to the view--a spectacle
whose mournfulness may interest as well as repel.

Was it with sensations resembling these (applied, however, rather to
the mind than to the eye) that the reader perused those pages devoted
to Hermanric and Antonina? Does the happiness there described now
appear to him to beam through the stormy progress of the narrative as
the spot of blue beams through the gathering clouds? Did that small
prospect of brightness present itself, at the time, like a garden of
repose amid the waste of fierce emotions which encompassed it? Did it
encourage him, when contrasted with what had gone before, to enter on
the field of gloomier interest which was to follow? If, indeed, it has
thus affected him, if he can still remember the scene at the farm-house
beyond the suburbs with emotions such as these, he will not now be
unwilling to turn again for a moment from the gathering clouds to the
spot of blue,--he will not deny us an instant's digression from Ulpius
and the city of famine to Antonina an