rst only at intervals through the gates, and gradually
both ceased to appear. Then the crowd approached nearer to the temple,
and felt the heat of the furnace they had kindled, as they looked in.

The iron gates were red hot--from the great mass behind (still glowing
bright in some places, and heaving and quivering with its own heat) a
thin, transparent vapour rose slowly to the stone roof of the building,
now blackened with smoke. The priests looked eagerly for the corpse of
the Pagan; they saw two dark, charred objects closely united together,
lying in a chasm of ashes near the gate, at a spot where the fire had
already exhausted itself, but it was impossible to discern which was
the man and which was the idol.

The necessity of providing means for entering the temple had not been
forgotten while the flames were raging. Proper implements for forcing
open the gates were now at hand, and already the mob began to dip their
buckets in the Tiber, and pour water wherever any traces of the fire
remained. Soon all obstacles were removed; the soldiers crowded into
the building with spades in their hands, trampled on the black, watery
mire of cinders which covered what had once been the altar of idols,
and throwing out into the street the refuse ashes and the stone images
which had remained unconsumed, dug in what was left, as in a new mine,
for the gold and silver which the fire could not destroy.

The Pagan had lived with his idols, had perished with his idols!--and
now where they were cast away, there he was cast away with them. The
soldiers, as they dug into fragments the black ruins of his altar,
mingled him in fragments with it! The people, as they cast the refuse
thrown out to them into the river, cast what remained of him with what
remained of his gods! And when the temple was deserted, when the
citizens had borne off all the treasure they could collect, when
nothing but a few heaps of dust was left of all that had been burnt,
the night-wind blew away before it the ashes of Ulpius with the ashes
of the deities that Ulpius had served!

CHAPTER 27.

THE VIGIL OF HOPE.

A new prospect now opens before us. The rough paths through which we
have hitherto threaded our way grow smoother as we approach their
close. Rome, so long dark and gloomy to our view, brightens at length
like a landscape when the rain is past and the first rays of returning
sunlight stream through the parting clouds. Some days have elaps