ed 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 would
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 only 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, who 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 vigour; they toiled to preserve his life as anxiously as
they had laboured 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
aro