his wife and children with a furious gang of desperadoes
who could not possibly surrender, surrendered himself, perhaps hoping
that he might save them after all.

The Carthaginian soldiers, following Hasdrubal's example, opened the
gates of the citadel, and let the conqueror in. The deserters were now
made absolutely desperate by their danger, and some of them, more
furious than the rest, preferring to die by their own hands rather
than to give their hated enemies the pleasure of killing them, set the
building in which they were shut up in on fire. The miserable inmates
ran to and fro, half suffocated by the smoke and scorched by the
flames. Many of them reached the roof. Hasdrubal's wife and children
were among the number. She looked down from this elevation, the
volumes of smoke and flame rolling up around her, and saw her husband
standing below with the Roman general--perhaps looking, in
consternation, for his wife and children, amid this scene of horror.
The sight of the husband and father in a position of safety made the
wife and mother perfectly furious with resentment and anger. "Wretch!"
she screamed, in a voice which raised itself above the universal din,
"is it thus you seek to save your own life while you sacrifice ours? I
can not reach you in your own person, but I kill you hereby in the
persons of your children." So saying, she stabbed her affrighted sons
with a dagger, and hurled them down, struggling all the time against
their insane mother's phrensy, into the nearest opening from which
flames were ascending, and then leaped in after them herself to share
their awful doom.

The Romans, when they had gained possession of the city, took most
effectual measures for its complete destruction. The inhabitants were
scattered into the surrounding country, and the whole territory was
converted into a Roman province. Some attempts were afterward made to
rebuild the city, and it was for a long time a place of some resort,
as men lingered mournfully there in huts that they built among the
ruins. It, however, was gradually forsaken, the stones crumbled and
decayed, vegetation regained possession of the soil, and now there is
nothing whatever to mark the spot where the city lay.

* * * * *

War and commerce are the two great antagonistic principles which
struggle for the mastery of the human race, the function of the one
being to preserve, and that of the other to destroy. Commerce c