Carthage the child was
always clad in purple silk as he rode through the streets in a shell
carriage drawn by ostriches."

"Day before yesterday the King brought to the miserable heap of straw
where he was lying the fragrant bread he had begged from the enemy. The
child devoured it so eagerly that we were obliged to check him. We
turned our backs a moment,--I was getting some water with the King for
the sick boy,--when a cry of mingled rage and grief summoned us. A
Moorish lad, probably attracted by the smell of the bread, had sprung
in through the open window and torn it from between the child's teeth.
It made a very deep impression on the King. 'This child, too, the
guiltless one? O terrible God!' he cried again and again. I closed the
boy's dying eyes to-day."

"It cannot last much longer. The people have killed the last horse
except Styx."

"Styx shall not be slaughtered," cried Hilda. "He bore you from certain
death; he saved you."

"_You_ saved me, with your Valkyria ride," exclaimed Gibamund; and,
happy in the midst of all the wretchedness, he pressed his beautiful
wife to his heart, kissing her golden hair, her eyes, her noble brow.
"Hark! what is that?"

"It is the song which he has composed and is singing to the harp Fara
sent him. Well for thee, Teja's stringed instrument, that thou art not
compelled to accompany such a dirge," she cried wrathfully, springing
up and tossing back her waving locks. "I would rather have shattered my
harp on the nearest rocks than lent it for such a song."

"But it works like a spell upon the Moors and Vandals."

"They do not understand it at all; the words are Latin. He has rejected
alliteration as pagan, as the magic of runes! He allows no one to
mention his last battle-song."

"Of course they scarcely understand it. But when they see the King as,
almost in an ecstasy, like a man walking in his sleep, with his burning
eyes half closed, his wan, sorrowful face surrounded by tangled locks,
his ragged royal mantle thrown around his shoulders, his harp on his
arm, he wanders alone over the rocks and snows of this mountain; when
they hear the deep, wailing voice, the mournful melody of the dirge, it
affects them like a spell, though they understand little of the
meaning. Hark! there it rises again."

Nearer and nearer, partly borne away by the wind, came in broken words,
sometimes accompanied by the strings, the chant:

"Woe to thee! I mourn, I mourn!