t 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 fallen 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 farther 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 over-populated 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 hours 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 th