uded,
Almamen stalked on, like a man walking in his sleep.

Ximen roused himself--softly unbarred the door which admitted to the
upper apartments, and motioned to his comrades to avail themselves of
the opening, but as Isaac--the first to accept the hint--crept across,
Almamen fixed upon him his terrible eye, and, appearing suddenly to
awake to consciousness, shouted out, "Thou miscreant, Ximen! whom hast
thou admitted to the secrets of thy lord? Close the door--these men must
die!"

"Mighty master!" said Ximen, calmly, "is thy servant to blame that he
believed the rumour that declared thy death? These men are of our holy
faith, whom I have snatched from the violence of the sacrilegious and
maddened mob. No spot but this seemed safe from the popular frenzy."
"Are ye Jews?" said Almamen. "Ah, yes! I know ye now--things of the
market-place and bazaar'. Oh, ye are Jews, indeed! Go, go! Leave me!"

Waiting no further licence, the three vanished; but, ere he quitted the
vault, Elias turned back his scowling countenance on Almamen (who had
sunk again into an absorbed meditation) with a glance of vindictive
ire--Almamen was alone.

In less than a quarter of an hour Ximen returned to seek his master; but
the place was again deserted.

It was midnight in the streets of Granada--midnight, but not repose. The
multitude, roused into one of their paroyxsms of wrath and sorrow, by
the reflection that the morrow was indeed the day of their subjection
to the Christian foe, poured forth through the streets to the number of
twenty thousand. It was a wild and stormy night; those formidable gusts
of wind, which sometimes sweep in sudden winter from the snows of the
Sierra Nevada, howled through the tossing groves, and along the winding
streets. But the tempest seemed to heighten, as if by the sympathy of
the elements, the popular storm and whirlwind. Brandishing arms and
torches, and gaunt with hunger, the dark forms of the frantic Moors
seemed like ghouls or spectres, rather than mortal men; as, apparently
without an object, save that of venting their own disquietude, or
exciting the fears of earth, they swept through the desolate city.

In the broad space of the Vivarrambla the crowd halted, irresolute in
all else, but resolved at least that something for Granada should yet
be done. They were for the most armed in their Moorish fashion; but
they were wholly without leaders: not a noble, a magistrate, an officer,
would have dreamed